I 



I HE 

Simple Truth 




Robert Collyer { 



The Simple Truth 



A HOME BOOK 



By ROBERT COLLYER 



BOSTON : 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 




Copyright, 1877, by 
LEE AND SHEPARD 

Copyright, 1905, by 
ROBERT COLLYER 
All Rights Reserved 



THE SIMPLE TRUTH 



TO THE MEMORY 

Or 

iiHg Heat ani @ootJ Jrtentr, 
JOHN EARLE WILLIAMS 

OF 

IRVINGTON ON THE HUDSON, 



CONTENTS. 



FAGS 

Growing Aged Together y 

Softly 25 

The Burden of an Old Song 39 

Referring Back ....... J . . , 57 

Wild Lilies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 

The Parable of the Prodigal Son . . . . . 89 

Slow and Sure . . 103 

Working and Resting . . . 119 

God's Poor 133 

A Carol with a Caution 147 



GROWING AGED TOGETHER. 



"Mercifully ordain that we may grow aged together." 

A Prayer of Tobit. 




GROWING AGED TOGETHER. 



I love to turn now and then to that touching 
story in the Apocrypha, of the young man and 
woman who were just married and ready to start 
together on their untried career, and especially to 
notice how this was their first cry to Heaven when 
the wedding-guests had gone, and they were alone 
in their chamber : " Mercifully ordain that we may 
grow aged together." 

The man had come a long way after his wife, and 
knew very little about her, except as her father had 
told him they were a good and honest stock. She 
was to go back with him, and live with him under 
the eye of her mother-in-law ; and how the experi- 
ment would succeed, as the years swept on, he 
had of course no idea. His mother was a woman 
of very notable qualities. When her husband went 
blind once, she turned out and made the living 
with her spinning-wheel ; and they were so delighted 



8 



Growing Aged Together. 



with her work in one place, that they gave her a kid 
in addition to her day's wages. But when she 
brought it home, and her husband heard it bleating, 
he wanted to know where she got that kid. She 
told him it was a present, but he did not believe 
her. He said she had stolen it ! Well, she could 
go out and work for him, but she could not and 
would not submit to a charge like that ; so she 
turned on him, and gave him such a piece of her 
mind as I suppose he never forgot as long as he 
lived : and after this they got along very well until 
better days came, and there is no hint in the family 
history that she ever referred to the thing again. 
She had it out with him then and there, and made 
him ashamed of himself, no doubt. And then, as 
she knew he was a true man, and he knew she was 
a true woman, in the face of this grim convulsion, 
they did not rush into the divorce court, or threat- 
en to do so ; — he did not turn brute, or she vixen : 
the sky cleared when the storm was over, and never 
clouded up again. And how the story got out, I 
have no idea : perhaps the man told it, a long time 
after, against himself. 

This young man was their one child, the pride 
and joy of their life ; and this was the home into 
which he was to' bring his wife. What would come 
of it, he could not tell. Whether she would settle 
kindly in the new place, or be all the time fret- 
ting after the home of her childhood ; whether 



Growing Aged Together. 9 



such a woman as his mother was, and as his wife 
ought to be, could so blend their supremacy as to 
make one music as before, instead of a discord 
that would make him rue the day he brought them 
togther, like the elements in a galvanic battery. 
All this was unknown to him ; but he knelt down 
with her, and prayed, " Mercifully ordain that we 
may grow aged together/' 

It was one of those weddings, too, for which we 
sometimes predict a leisurely repentance, — love at 
first sight, followed by very brief courtship, and 
then the wedding, friends' congratulations, kisses, 
tears, laughter, and a supper, which they ate, no 
doubt, looking shyly at each other, and wondering 
whether it could be possible they were husband and 
wife. Was it a dream that had come true, or only 
a dream ; a drama, or that out of which all dra- 
mas are made ; a mirage of sun and mist on the 
horizon of their life, or the essence and sub- 
stance of realities ? Poor things ! they were both 
quite young ; they did not know much of the world 
they had lived in, and nothing at all of the world 
they were entering. Since they first met, it had 
been Eden unfallen, with the dew of heaven on it. 
Did they wonder whether a brief space would 
find them outside their Eden, in among the thorns 
and briers, with a flaming sword at the gates, for- 
bidding their return ? I can only wonder : I cannot 
tell ; but this is worth more than all such surmise^ — ■ 



io Growing Aged Together. 



they knelt down together, in the still, sweet sanctity 
of their chamber, with the light of Eden on their 
faces, with its sweetness and purity like an atmos- 
phere about them • and then the man prayed, and 
the woman said Amen to this prayer. 

It was natural also, that, coming together as they 
did, they should know very little of each other in 
regard to those details of the life before them, on 
which so very much must depend in the course of 
time. There was a story in their sacred books 
about a fore-elder who had made just such a 
match as this, and it didn't turn out well at all. 
They were unrelated souls ; and as time went on, 
it revealed the difference so fatally, that when he 
was an old man, and blind, she practised on him a 
gross deception, to gain a blessing for her favorite 
son, he had meant to bestow on his own. They 
may have thought of this, and wondered whether 
their trust in each other would ever come to such 
an end as that. He had swept suddenly into the 
circle of her life, — a fine, stalwart fellow, filling up 
the picture she had in her heart of the man she 
would marry. But she really knew no more about 
him than he knew about her. Could he hold his 
own as bread-winner, and she as bread-maker? 
Could he keep a home over her head, and could 
she make it bright and trim, as a man loves to see 
his home when he comes in tired, and wants to 
rest? Would he turn out selfish or self-forgetful, 



Growing Aged Together, 1 1 

or she a frivolous gossip, or a woman he could 
trust like his own soul? Would the sunshine break 
out in his face as he entered his own door, and 
meet the sunshine breaking out on hers ? Would 
she cry, " Husband, here's your slippers : little 
Anna has been toasting them this half-hour ; " and 
he reply, " Ah, wife ! you're the woman to think of 
a man. Where are the children?" Or would he 
save all his snarls until he had shut the door, and 
sat down to supper, and she gave him back his own 
with usury? There it all lay before them, — the 
vast, unknown possibility, leading to heaven or to 
hell by the time they got to their silver wedding. 
There was but one wish resting in their hearts, 
come what would, — resting there as the lark, in 
my old home-land, rests among the heather • and 
then it soared, as the lark soars, singing into heav- 
en ; and this was the burden of their spring-time 
melody, — " Mercifully ordain that we may grow 
aged together." 

Still we have to see how this cry would be of no 
more use then than it is now sometimes, if it did 
not stand through all the time to come, at once as a 
safeguard and an inspiration, — a safeguard against 
some things that prevent our growing aged together, 
and an inspiration to some that help us. It was a 
natural and most beautiful longing just then voicing 
itself out of their pure hearts' love. They felt sure 
they had been made for each other ; and while they 



12 ' Growing Aged Together. 

knew that time must turn the raven to white, furrow 
the brow, blench the bloom, and touch all their fac- 
ulties with its wintry frost, if they should live, still 
they wanted the good God to deal them out an 
even measure together. This seems to me to be 
the binding word of the whole story • together then 
as now, in the autumn as in the spring, in taking 
as in giving, — until they were borne away, not far 
apart, into the life to come. 

But touching the most outward things of our life, 
I can see a danger, if they do not take care, that 
their prayer will not and can not be answered. 
They may both grow aged, that may be as God 
ordains ; and they may live together while their life 
lasts, that must be as they ordain : yet this day may 
be, for all that, the end of their equality in age. 
For if he were one of those men we have all known, 
whose life and soul is given over to business, who 
rise early and sit up late, and work like galley-slaves 
to make a fortune, and she were one of those 
women who take life easy, and run no risks, he 
might be a broken-down old man with a fortune, 
while she was still young enough to enjoy it. Or 
if he had a secret vice, such as keeping ice-water 
on the side-board, and a sample-room in the closet, 
or any other of those subtle and dangerous devils 
that are always watching for a chance to drag a 
man down, while she held her life sweet and pure 
and true, then, long before their silver wedding, he 



Growing Aged Together, 1 3 

may be in his grave, or be fit for very little out of 
it ; an old man in mid-age, with the warning finger 
of paralysis on his shoulder, or the splints of inflam- 
matory rheumatism in his marrow, — ■ a broken man 
she has to nurse like a fretful child. Or if she, 
poor girl, is beginning this wedded life, as so many 
of our girls do, without the fine sturdy womanhood 
of the open air, with a bloom on her blessed face 
like that you see on the blossoms in a hot-house, 
while he has in him the strong vitality of the desert 
and the hills, then, by the time she has borne those 
six sons we hear of afterward, she will have aged 
two years to his one. I know, if he has a man's 
heart in his breast, he will love her and cherish her 
all the more for her lost beauty and broken health ; 
and some blessing may be found in this altered rela- 
tion which might never have come to their perfect 
equality. But this is not the real kernel of the 
question. This blended being of the man and 
woman is, first of all, a piece of exquisite mechan- 
ism, ordained of heaven for a certain work on this 
earth ; and it is the first condition of it, that all the 
arms of its power shall be equal to their design. 
Now, where this power fails by our folly, on either 
side, the thing in that shape is past praying for : we 
can only pray then for power and grace to make the 
best of it ; and, thank God, that prayer can always be 
answered. So I hope, when they cried, " Mercifully 
ordain that we may grow aged together," this out- 



14 Growing Aged Together. 



ward condition of equality in health and strength 
was there in their nature ; or they might as well pray 
that the wheels of a watch, one half pewter and the 
other half steel, might be of equal endurance and 
worth. 

And so to-day, if young men are not honest and 
wholesome clean through, and if young women will 
not train themselves to the finest and sturdiest 
womanhood possible to their nature ; if they will 
not eat brown bread, and work in the garden — if 
they have one — with some more grip than a bird 
scratching, and quit reading novels in a hot room, 
and devouring sweetmeats ; if they dare not face 
the sun and wind, and try to out-walk, ay, and out- 
run their brothers, and let our wise mother Nature 
buckle their belt, — they had not better say Amen 
when the stalwart young husband cries, " Merci- 
fully ordain that we may grow aged together." 

This, however, is the most outward condition ; 
reaching inward, we find others more delicate and 
divine. These young people have now to find each 
other out, and they may spend a lifetime in doing 
that. Some married folks find each other out, as I 
have read of mariners finding out the polar world. 
They leave the shores of their single life in the 
spring days, with tears and benedictions, sail on 
a while in sunshine and fair weather, and then find 
their way little by little into the cold latitudes, where 
they see the sun sink day by day, and feel the frost 



Growing Aged Together. 15 



creep in, until they give up at last, and turn to ice 
sitting at the same table, 

Others, again, find each other out as we have 
been finding out this continent. They nestle down 
at first among the meadows, close by the clear 
streams ; then they go on through a belt of shadow, 
lose their way, and find it again the best they know, 
and come out into a larger horizon and a better 
land ; they meet their difficult hills, and climb them 
together, strike deserts and dismal places, and cross 
them together ; and so at last they stand on the 
further reaches of the mountains, and see the other 
ocean sunning itself sweet and still, and then their 
journey ends. But through shadows and shine, this 
is the gospel for the day : they keep together right 
on to the end. They allow no danger, disaster, or 
difference to divide them, and no third person to 
interfere ; for if they do it may be as if William and 
Mary of England had permitted the great Louis 
to divide their throne by first dividing their hearts. 

Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? 
A wise and witty man 1 says : " It resembles a pair 
of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated : 
often moving in opposite directions, yet always pun- 
ishing any one who comes between them." The 
definition is as witty as it is wise ; and he might 
have added, Part the shears, and then all you have 
left is two poor daggers. 

1 Sydney Smith. 



1 6 Growing Aged Together. 

So it is possible we may grow aged in finding 
each other out, and wondering why we never saw 
that trait before, or struck that temper ; but if there 
be between us a true heart, if the rivet holds, then 
the added years will only bring added reasons for a 
perfect union, and the sweet old ballad will be our 
psalm of life : — 

" John Anderson, -my Jo, John, 

We clamb the hill togither ; 
And many a canty day, John, 

We've had wi' ane anither ; 
Now we maun toddle down, John, 

But hand in hand we'll go, 
And sleep together at the foot, 

John Anderson, my Jo." 

We must find each other out ; and then it is pos- 
sible that, like my mother's old shears, over which 
I used to ponder when I was a child, one side is 
greater, and the other, by consequence, less. 

I found James Mott delighted, one evening when 
I went to call on him, because, while he was work- 
ing in his garden, two men went by, and one said, 
"That is James Mott." — "And who is James 
Mott? " — " Why, don't you know? " He is Lucretia 
Mott's husband." Now, James Mott was by no 
means a common man : with a lesser half, he 
would have seemed a great man ; and he was great 
in his steady and perfect loyalty to truth and good- 
ness. But his wife was the woman of a century, 



Growing Aged Together. 17 



while he was so noble and great of soul as to be 
glad and proud of her greatness, and at the same 
time he seemed all the greater for his worship, — a 
feat, I notice, few men are able to accomplish. 

Audubon, our great naturalist, married a good, 
sweet woman ; and when she began to find him out, 
she found he would wander off a thousand miles 
in quest of a bird. She said "Amen ! " and went 
with him, camped in the woods, lived in log huts 
and shanties on the frontier, anywhere to be with 
him. She entered into his enthusiasm, shared his 
labor, and counted all things but loss for the excel- 
lency of the glory of being Audubon's wife. When 
the children began to come to them, he had to 
wander off alone ; but he could not go into a valley 
so deep, or a wilderness so distant, that the light 
would not shine on him out of their windows. He 
knew exactly where he would find her, and how she 
would look ; for while, as Ruskin reminds us, the 
clouds are never twice alike, the sunshine is always 
familiar, and it was sunshine he saw when he looked 
homeward. So, if you have read his notes, you will 
remember how his heart breaks forth into singing 
in all sorts of unexpected places as he thinks of the 
wife and children waiting his return ; and in that 
way they lived their life until they dropped into the 
lap of God like mellow fruit. It was laid on the 
man to do this curious wild work. How the 
woman's heart yearned to have him home, we may 



1 8 Growing Aged Together. 



well imagine, and how gladly she would have given 
up some of his greatness to keep her children's 
father at her side : but she did not tell him so, if she 
was the woman I think she was ; and so she is 
changed into the same image, from glory to glory. 
Growing aged together in the body, they are 
touched now in the spirit with immortal youth. 

The little idyl ends without telling us how the 
answer came to this cry on a wedding night, or 
whether it came at all as they expected and hoped. 
But that it did come in some good, sweet way, is 
certain ; for there is no word about a convulsion, 
and they have six sons. They move away, when 
the good wife is dead ; and after that we only see 
the man who lives, the neighbors believe, to be 
a hundred and twenty-seven. It makes little dif- 
ference, that we do not know exactly how their life 
together ended. If they kept these safeguards, and 
followed this inspiration I have tried to touch, I 
know it was all right. 

When Oberlin was eighty years old, and very 
infirm, climbing one of his native mountains one 
day, he was obliged to lean on the arm of a younger 
man, while his wife, who was still strong, walked by 
herself. Meeting one of his parishioners, the old 
man felt so awkward at his seeming lack of gal- 
lantry, that he insisted on stopping and telling just 
how it was : she could not lean on his arm, but she 
leaned on his heart all the same ; they had grown 



Growing Aged Together. 19 



aged together, but he had shot a little ahead ; they 
must not think there was any other reason ; it was 
as it always had been, only he was the weaker vessel 
now, and would his friend please say so when he 
happened to mention what he had seen? So it 
would be with these twain, in that far-away Eastern 
valley : they would keep together ; and, when the 
arm failed, the heart would still abide in the old 
beautiful strength. 

" And what did you see ? " I said once to a friend 
who had been into the Lake country, and who, on 
his return, told me he had gone to Wordsworth's 
home. "I saw the old man," he said, "walking 
in the garden with his wife. They are both quite 
old, and he is almost blind ; but they seemed just 
like sweethearts courting, they were so tender to 
each other, and attentive." Miss Martineau tells 
us the same story, with the additional particulars of 
a near neighbor, how the old wife would miss her 
husband, and trot out, and find him asleep perhaps 
in the sun, run for his hat, tend him and watch over 
him till he awoke ; and so it was that when he died 
they made one grave deep enough for both, and 
when she died they were one, — one in the dust as 
they were one in heaven, and had been on earth 
for over forty years. The world came to Words- 
worth at last, but the wife at first. " Worse and 
worse," Jeffrey said, when a new poem came out : 
" Better and better," said the wife. The world 



20 



Growing Aged Together, 



might scoff \ the wife believed. She was no Sarah 
to laugh at the angel of the Lord. What wonder, 
then, they were sweethearts still at threescore and 
ten? 

So the wife of Thomas Carlyle, the woman with 
the brave blood of John old Knox coursing through 
her heart, upheld her husband through all weathers, 
proud of his strength, tender of his weakness, and 
never s?ying, " Thomas, pray do write so that peo- 
ple can understand you." His wild, weird words 
might puzzle her brain, but they were simple Saxon 
to her heart ; and so when she died he had graven 
on her tomb, " For forty years she was the true and 
loving helpmate of her husband, and unweariedly 
forwarded him as none else could in all of worthy 
that he did or attempted." 

And so this is a prayer we can all make to God 
on our wedding-day, and, if we will, on any day 
and every day after, and always find the answer in 
the cry. Is there danger that we shall make it hard 
for Heaven to answer us in the tale of the years, 
because we are using them up like a candle lighted 
at both ends ? we can guard against that. Is there 
danger that while we may grow aged together in 
fears, there still may be such a fatal difference of 
spirit and purpose that at threescore and ten we 
may merely be two old people who have found 
each other out, and in our knowledge have made 
shipwreck of our love ? we can guard against that. 



Growing Aged Together, 21 



No man and woman ever cried out with their whole 
heart, " Mercifully ordain that we may grow aged 
together/' who did not find well-springs in their 
dryest deserts, gleams of sunlight stealing through 
their darkest shadows, an arm of power for their 
most appalling steeps, and sunny resting-places all 
the way. 

I think the average novel is making sad mischief 
in the average mind in its pictures of true love. It 
makes the tender glow and glamour which related 
natures feel when they meet, true love. It is no 
such thing : it is true passion, that is all ; a blessed 
power purely and rightly used, but no more true 
love than those little hooks and tendrils we see in 
June, on a shooting vine, are the ripe clusters of 
October. For true love grows out of reverence 
and deference, loyalty and courtesy, good service 
given and taken, dark days and bright days, sorrow 
and joy. It is the fine essence of all we are 
together, and all we do. True passion comes 
first, true love last. " It is sown a natural body, it 
is raised a spiritual body ; " and so it is written, 
"The first man is of the earth earthy, but the 
second man is the Lord from heaven." 



SOFTLY . 



"The children art tender: I will lead on softly." 

Jacob to Esau. 



SOFTLY. 



It was one of the secrets of my craft, in the old 
days when I wanted to weld iron or work steel to 
a fine purpose, to begin gently. If I began, as all 
learners do, to strike my heaviest blows at the start, 
the iron would crumble instead of welding, or the 
steel would suffer under my hammer, so that when 
it came to be tempered it would " fly," as we used 
to say, and rob the thing I had made of its finest 
quality. It was the first condition of a good job 
to begin gently ; in a moment or two I could come 
down with a firmer hand, and before I was through 
pour out all my might in a sturdy storm of blows ; 
but, if I began with the storm at this kind of work, 
I ended, as a rule, with a wreck. 

I notice the same principle as a rule in the great 
iron-mills. The reason why the Nasmyth hammer 
can come down so gently as just to crack an egg, 
and then can smite like a small earthquake, lies 

2 5 



26 



Softly. 



in the need there is that there should be such a 
compass of power and gentleness within the same 
device. Take the gentleness out on the one hand, 
or the ponderous might on the other, and the thing 
fails of its completeness. The perfection lies in 
the blending ; because the work this blind giant has 
to do is very much like that your good smith has to 
do, — to come down gently as a June shower, or 
to smite like a tornado, according to the need. 

So you have noticed a skilful mechanic start a 
new machine, — a steam-engine in the factory, a 
locomotive on the track, or a sewing-machine in 
the living-room : it is no matter, he always begins 
gently. He may be ever so sure it is all right, and 
that all the parts are balanced perfectly : it is the 
first condition of keeping the balance true, that his 
machine shall not go tearing away at high pressure 
on the instant, but shall feel its way into the best 
it can do through a sort of separate intelligence it 
has managed to grasp by reason of its birth and 
breeding. It is the man's child in a sense, and he 
knows exactly what to do in order that it may do 
honor to his hand and brain. He must let this 
fine fruit of his life have time to find its way into a 
full action gently : so you notice he will ease a 
little here, and tighten a little there, just a thought, 
as he says with an exquisite fitness of the word to 
the deed, and so at last his work is well done. 

I watched this principle again in a grand organ, 



Softly. 



27 



when they were building up and bringing out 
its harmonies. The skilful fellow who had that 
work to do did not start out by putting all the pipes 
in their places, pulling out all the stops, and then 
storming you with one crash of melody which 
would shake the church. I noticed he began gen 
tly with some of the finest chords, made those true, 
and then went on to others of a greater volume, 
and so wrought on to the end. Now and then I 
would sit for half an hour listening, and wondering 
at the gentle patience. I could not make out half 
the cadences, or see the use of half the trouble he 
took : he was using a fine spirit he had in his nature 
to detect the dissonance, while I went by the rule 
of thumb. I got so tired at last of the whole busi- 
ness, that I begged one day he would let the music 
out in one great flood. He did it to please me, 
but I was not pleased. The organ was not ready 
for such a revelation, and he knew that, of course ; 
only ministers must have their own way sometimes 
when they are all wrong, and I had my way. But 
now, out of a gentle, patient touch, which never 
halts, and never loses its temper, this wonderful 
instrument has grown to be a perpetual delight. 

You have noticed again, that in training a fine 
animal for good service the trainer begins gently. 
He smites the tiger with an iron bar, and cows 
him ; but if he is a wise man he talks to his horse, 
allures him, courts him, and makes a friend of him. 



28 



Softly. 



It was imagined within my day, that to have a good 
horse you must break him. I notice the word is 
seldom used now : we do not break, we train. Only 
the most vicious are broken ; and they end, as a 
rule, with a well-proven demonstration of the worth- 
lessness of the plan. If they do not learn to love, 
but only to fear you, if on their bells is not written 
"Holiness to the Lord" in that true fashion which 
would please good Mr. Bergh, then the day is al- 
most sure to come when they will break out in one 
superb dash of desperation, and make you feel with 
Balaam that there may be but one step between 
your tormented brute and death. 

And so I love to note such things as these, as I 
watch the perpetual advent of little children into 
this life of ours, and wonder how we shall deal 
with them in the one wise way which will weld 
them, shall I say, to whatsoever things are true and 
lovely and of good report, start them to the surest 
purpose, or train them so as to bring out the whole 
power for good God has hidden in their nature. 
There must be one right way. I think this father of 
little children found it when he said, " The children 
are tender : I will lead them gently.' 9 They may 
seem crude as unwelded iron or unshapen steel, or 
mere machines, or little brutes ; and there are men 
in the world who seem, by their action, to have 
some such notion of a child's nature, to their eter- 
nal shame. All the same if these hints from what is 



Softly. 



29 



so like and unlike are of any use, here is the prin- 
ciple at the very outset of our endeavor to make a 
man out of our man-child, and a woman out of our 
maid-child : they are tender, we must lead on softly. 
Solomon may slip in with his cruel maxim of, " Spare 
the rod, and spoil the child : " he has no business 
about my place while my children are tender. I 
can no more be hard on them than Jesus could. 
If I hurt them in this evil way, I hurt those who are 
of the kingdom of heaven. My gray hairs have 
brought me this wisdom (and woe is me, I should 
be so wise !), that the unpardonable sin is to be hard 
on a tender child. I do not know whether God 
forgives me : I know I do not forgive myself. They 
forget, I hope : I do not forget. No cut of the 
hand or the tongue ever fell from a true father on 
such a child, that failed to ache forever in the 
heart of the giver ; and no such thing was ever done 
which was not a damage all round. I do not won- 
der the old grandsire is so gentle with the second 
generation. He will not tell you, or himself per- 
haps, how it is that he is so tender with these new 
buds on the tree of life. He is trying to make it 
up to them : poor man, it is all he can do now. 
He would fain recall some passages in his father- 
hood, but that cannot be done ; and so he chokes 
back the inextinguishable regret, and humbly tries to 
get even through the over-measure. My good old 
mother was something of a Spartan with her boys ; 



3° 



Softly. 



a very gentle Spartan, still now and then she would 
make stern work of it, for we were a rough lot. 
But it was wonderfully beautiful to see her in her 
old age spreading her wide motherly wings over the 
children of the new day : she could no more be 
hard on them, no matter what pranks they played, 
than your May sun can be hard on your May blos- 
som. It was the return of the heart to the soft 
answer, the sweet submission to the better plan, 
the vision of the infinite worth of gentle ways with 
tender folk, the endeavor, unknown to herself, to 
ease her dear old heart of what little pain was 
there from the old days, — the feeling that she might 
perhaps have gone more softly once with those she 
had then in hand ; and so I want no better nurse 
for those we have given back to God than the 
good old soul who could not quite see things in this 
light forty years ago. 

For while I have likened this gentle dealing to 
things so remote that I might suggest to you, even 
by these uncouth parallels, how entirely wrong we 
are when we try any thing save gentleness with 
these tender natures, my instances fall far below 
the truth, the moment we remember that these 
children are not things at all we can turn out to 
pattern, but human beings, each one living to him- 
self or herself, holding a secret we cannot fathom, 
possessing powers perhaps we cannot even guess 
at ; our children after the flesh, God's children after 



Softly. 



3i 



the spirit, but intrusted to our hands and to our 
homes, that, coming out of heaven with hints of the 
angels in them, they may go back when their time 
comes, as sealed saints. 

Because, when we say that no two faces are alike, 
we can say with a far deeper reason, that no two 
natures are alike. The boy may be the image of 
his father ; yet the life within them may be no more 
the same than if they had been born a thousand 
miles apart. We bend over these opening lives, 
and try to see our own image in them : it is not 
there. We detect a faculty, a turn, a temper, we 
know we never had. That holy spirit which 
watches us forever, selects and saves by a law we 
do not half understand ; and so we do not under- 
stand these tender natures until we know what 
these powers are which are waking out of their 
sleep. So if we imagine the child is such an one 
as ourselves, we have plenty of room to blunder in 
dealing with him as we would be dealt by if we were 
in his place. Your son may be no more like you in 
some most vital thing than David was like Jesse. 

Now, we always walk softly if we do not know our 
way, and that way lies through great shadows ; and 
here is where the child differs from the machine. 
We know what the machine can do : we have no 
such knowledge of the child. My boy may have a 
faculty in possession of his nature, which in thirty 
years will be a benediction to the human family ; 



3 2 



Softly, 



but to-day, through the overplus of its power com- 
pared with his other powers and his knowledge of 
the world he lives in, it may look like a vice to me, 
and may grow to be a vice, if I do not say, " The 
child is tender, I will lead on softly." 

I will suppose he is born with an overplus of 
imagination, so that things appear to him as reali- 
ties, which have no existence except as the magic 
light of that imagination has thrown a picture 
against the white surface of his world. And so I 
suddenly discover, as I imagine, that he is lying right 
and left ; and then he gets, not a gentle guidance 
through which he can find the line at last between 
thoughts and things, but first a stern warning, and 
then what I call a good sound whipping. Many 
a minister has flogged his boy for this turn, when 
he ought to have flogged himself like one of the 
old hermits. Here is a case in which they are alike, 
but with a difference. The sire has been drawing 
on his imagination, time out of mind, for the matter 
of his sermons. The son has come honestly by the 
faculty, but he is not shrewd enough to see how far 
he can go without being found out. The rein lies 
on the neck of his power as yet, and so it carries 
him whither it will ; and then perhaps the father even 
prays for him at the family altar, as if he were a son 
of perdition, and helps to make him one through 
such prayers. " Gently," I would say to such a 
man \ " turn the lash the other way • pray for insight 



Softly. 



33 



and foresight : this may be a rare gift you do not 
understand. The loftiest poet that ever sang may 
be but a vaster liar by your base criterion." 

We must take note that the children are tender 
also as we try to train them. My small daughter, 
speaking of a neighbor's child one day, said, " She 
is going to a cemetery now ; " and then a little 
laugh went round the table at the curious trip of the 
tongue. But I said to myself, It may be so : who 
knows? These tender folk do go to the cemetery 
many a time through the school, or might as well 
be there for any chance at life they have after they 
come out of school. We could hardly light on a 
wiser or a better woman than dear old Mrs. Bar- 
bauld. Her hymns for infant minds still linger 
like a benediction ; but she was so eager to make 
a remarkable man out of her little nephew, Charles 
Aikin, that she educated him out of his mind into 
idiocy. 1 So a great many good fathers and moth- 
ers, who would shrink from laying heavy burdens 
on the backs of their children, do not hesitate a 
moment about laying such burdens on the nerve 
and brain. They urge them on at their books, or 
permit the teachers to do it, until the poor young 
things lose more in wealth of life, and life's worth, 
than their education will ever pay for. Lead on 
softly, then, in these paths of learning. If your 
children want to rush ahead at a pace which will 

1 Mrs. Farrar's Recollections of Seventy Years. 



34 



Softly. 



leave them learned invalids, hold them back ; a 
true education is not a long fever. Here and there 
a child may need to be urged on a little ; but I 
frankly confess, that under the high pressure of our 
public schools I take the children's side in all their 
little plots to stay away a day from school when 
they have been hard at work for many days. I like 
to plot with them. Their success pleases me, more 
than their failure. If they will be frank, and bring 
the matter before the home tribunal, they can al- 
ways be sure of one advocate who will plead their 
cause with a moving eloquence rooted in old memo- 
ries of half-holidays that are written in letters of gold. 

In the culture of the heart, also, we must lead on 
softly. I can no more believe that hard and cruel 
thoughts of God will be good for my children, than 
I can believe in hard and cruel words and blows. 
I have no doubt there are more so-called infidels 
made and confirmed to that end, by fathers who 
thought they were doing God sendee, than there 
are of any other type, especially among the culti- 
vated classes. Such a course may have answered 
well enough for the father. He had got along, it 
may be, to where such thoughts could do him no 
great harm when they struck him. There was no 
such reality in them at any time as there is in what 
he does in the bank, or what he thinks as he 
watches the molten iron in the furnace. But, 
while this is theology to him, it is very often grim, 



Softly. 



35 



hard, real, biting torment, to the tender child. It 
shuts out heaven and opens hell to him ; it is cruel, 
cruel, cruel, as the hissing and biting of serpents, to 
some delicate, small souls. I suffered more agony 
at one time in my childhood, when a revivalist got 
hold of me, and made me believe I might wake up 
in hell when I laid my poor little head on the 
pillow, tired to death of my fears, than from any 
other thing that ever struck me. There is the way 
to do a fatal mischief, the way the seeds of infi- 
delity are sown in many a noble nature. It is 
simply the revolt at, the resistance to, and the rejec- 
tion of, a God the nature is too large and sweet 
and tender to tolerate. If, in these early days, 
there is no day-star of a lovelier light, no dawning 
for the small bright soul of a better day, then there 
may be no chance for that soul to pass into the 
kingdom until it has passed out of the world. I 
had a very touching letter not long ago from an 
army officer away out on the frontier. He told me 
how he had gone through sore trouble for his soul's 
sake, but had somehow felt his way out of the great 
grim shadows into a sunny peace and rest. " I 
have little children," he said, " and I want them to 
be trained up within this better life and light from 
the start, but I am a poor hand to pray and teach 
them ; I am not sure I can do it if I try ; and so 
will you please send me some good little manual to 
help along out to the fort?" That good man has 



36 



Softly. 



got hold of the clew : those children will be led 
softly. The secret of the Lord is in the gentle, 
soldierly heart : they will rise up to call him blessed. 
There will be no revolt from the heaven which 
bends over those tender natures, no turning away 
from the infinite love, no terror of the eternal tor- 
ment : their religion will be part and parcel of 
their very life. 

And then, when we have done all this, I know ol 
nothing better beside, than that we shall put the 
whole wealth of our endeavor back into the hands 
of God in the spirit of this prayer of Schiller's 
father for his son : — 

" O God, thou knowest my poverty in good gifts 
for my son's inheritance. Graciously permit that 
even as the want of bread became to thy son's 
hunger-stricken flock in the wilderness the pledge 
of overflowing abundance, so likewise my darkness 
may in its sad extremity carry with it the measure 
of thy unfathomable light. And, because I cannot 
give to my son the least of blessings, do thou give 
the greatest ; because in my hands there is not any 
thing, do thou pour out all things from thine, 
And this temple of a new-born spirit, which I can- 
not adorn even with earthly ornaments of dust and 
ashes, do thou irradiate with the celestial adorn- 
ment of thy presence, and finally with that peace 
tvhich passeth all understanding." 



I 



1HE BURDEN OF AN OLD SONG. 



" Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." 



THE BURDEN OF AN OLD 
SONG, 



If preachers ever exhaust the Bible, so that they 
must find a new store of texts to preach from, I 
think this is sure to be one of them, " There is no 
place like home." In the heart of a grain of wheat 
the miller tells me there is one spot of a golden 
cast, which is the reason for a certain delicate gold- 
en hue, if you grind the wheat for bread, and if 
you. sow it, there lies the, germ of all the harvests. 
What that germ is to the grain, the home is to the 
man. Strip away the enfolding nurture, and bare 
him to the heart of his being, and there you find 
the golden spot which colors all, and is the living 
germ for harvests that are yet to be. 

In my last journey to Europe I went through a 
part of Scotland, which seemed to me to be about 
as wild a land as one would wish to see, just rock 
and heather, with tumbling seas for a setting, and 
here and there a reach of green country on which, 

39 



4 o 



The Burden of an Old Song. 



with my vision of our wonderful prairies, I thought 
it was a pity a man should try to live. I have read 
since then the life of a man who was raised in that 
land, and the days do not seem long enough for 
time to sing its praises. The wild sea, and rocks, 
and heather are more to him than the fee-simple of 
the State of Illinois would . be • and, canny Scot as 
he is, you feel all the time he would not make the 
exchange if he had the chance \ because these wild 
lands were his home, and stay away down in his 
heart, he can leave them no more than he can leave 
his own soul. And there was one boy in our ham- 
let, of my own age, who came up from his birth in 
the poor-house. I went there, when I was over, to 
see some of the old inmates ; and, asking after this 
boy, they told me how he had risen in the world, 
had been there to see them, and had gone over 
the dismal old building with a most tender and 
moving interest. And so it is, I suppose, with us all. 
It is no matter how forbidding the land may be, or 
how hard the lot, or how unwilling we may be, 
after many years, to go back there and stay : there 
is no place like that first home. We seem to be 
tethered to it still, when we live on the other side 
of the world. Those are white days, when in our 
childhood we can rush away and see the world 
which lies beyond the line, where the hills touch 
the sky, and then come back to the old nest ; but I 
doubt whether any days are ever so dark again as 



The Burden of an Old Song. 41 

those we have to live through when we leave home 
for good, and know that the old life is over. And 
white days when we can eat at another table, and 
wonder how it is our mother does not make things 
taste so good as those do they give us there ; but 
when our mother has done with us, and the bread 
of strangers is the staff of our life, we wonder again 
whether anybody ever will make things taste so 
good as those she gave us in the old time. Indeed, 
I have known men well on in life hold stoutly to 
the idea that their wives fell far short of their 
mothers in this matter, and, if the dear old soul was 
still in the world, had to go home in order to get 
over their dream, and then, if they were men of 
grace, to come back perhaps, and say, " Well, wife, 
I do think, after all, that the bread which deserves 
to take the first prize is this in which you have 
hidden your own wedding-ring. " 

I notice this far-reaching love for the old home 
does not depend, as a rule, again, on the way in 
which those who raise us are bound by the Scrip- 
ture, " Train up a child in the way he should go ; " 
because in that case the chances are, they will make 
the sad mistake of thinking a good deal more of 
the way than they do of the child. And then to 
this mistake they bring another. They fix their 
minds on the other end, instead of the hither end 
of the way, and train up the child for what they 
think he ought to be at forty, rather than for what 



42 The Burden of an Old Song. 

he is anywhere between four and fourteen. So it 
falls out very often, that those children whG have 
been subjected to the most thorough training all 
through their childhood turn out a shame to their 
kinsfolk, go directly in the face of all this training, 
and, when they once get away from home, think of 
it with the least affection. The truth is, in such a 
case, they have made havoc of the child, in order to 
make a man, and tried to force that to a speedy head 
which Nature has determined shall only round and 
ripen in the large leisure of the spring and summer 
of our life ; and, then when they are through, those 
God gave them for all sweet and noble ends feel 
they have been cheated out of their childhood, so 
they do not love that which has never been truly 
revealed to them ; and, having been cheated out of 
the kindly and wholesome joy of the years that 
come once and no more, they are like young 
horses that have been held in by a cruel bit : once 
let them get the bit between their teeth, or slip out 
of the bridle, and they will plunge on like mad 
things, careless of consequences in the measure of 
the strength and fire which is hidden all the time 
in their nature. 

That grand Scotchman I mentioned just now 1 
was a minister, so was his father and grandfather, 
and all Presbyterians ; but it is simply wonderful to 
notice how the ideal of such a minister's home has 

1 Norman Macleod. 



The Burden of an Old Song, 43 

changed for the worse, as I think, if the children 
are to think of it in the next century as the dearest 
place on earth. The grandsire was the father of 
sixteen children, so there was enough to do in the 
way of tending and training in a poor highland 
parish. But on a winter's night the minister would 
get out his fiddle, bid the boys put away their 
books, and the girls their sewing, strike up a swing- 
ing Scotch reel, and set them dancing to his music ; 
and then, when they were through, they had family 
prayer. Think for a moment of such a scene as 
that in the habitation of your Presbyterian minis- 
ters here in the North-West, or, for that matter, any- 
where in America. Yet I doubt whether a nobler 
man ever lived in the highlands than that good old 
country parson. So it was in a fair measure in the 
home in which this lad himself was trained. There 
is a wide sky above it, and a warm atmosphere 
within, plenty of freedom between task and task, 
plenty of room for the tender roots of childhood 
to strike down into the interstices of the mass of 
hard reality, and to find nurture as the vines find it 
among the rocks that have been enriched with fine 
mould. " Only two things," the man said long after, 
" my father and mother tried to instil into us, and 
these were truth and love. They had no cranks or 
twists or crotchets or isms. When the time came for 
my father to give us a good blowing-up, we got it ; 
but he made no fuss about trifles or failures or in- 



44 The Burden of an Old Song, 



firmities." And so it was, that, when this man came 
to be a leader among men, his heart went back to 
the old home among the wild hills and seas. A 
great sunny, catholic heart, touched to its fine per- 
fection in that nest where, as he says again, " Chris- 
tianity was taken for granted, and never forced on 
us with a scowl or a frown ; where the good old 
Catholic priest would always come with his troubles, 
and be sure to find counsel and sympathy, and 
where he always staid as a most honored guest in 
his visitations to that side of his great rambling 
parish." The boys fitted up the attic for a sort of 
home theatre ; and this one was the leader in the 
play, to which the family came in state. They 
tumbled round in the wild waters, and wandered 
away after wild things on the moors, and climbed 
the rocks at the risk of all their bones. But still 
the strong old home held them to its heart ; and 
that grace touched them which is not at all this 
hectic fever with which small souls are badgered 
now under the guise of getting religion, but love 
and truth, and a heart open to heaven in the most 
natural, therefore the most beautiful way. So the 
boy grew to be a most noble man ; and when he 
died, he gave commandment concerning his bones, 
and was buried close to the old nest, with the wild 
hills for sentinels about his grave. 

When we say, then, there is no place like home, 
it is wise to see what we mean by such an axiom 



The Burden of an Old Song. 45 

The home may be but a better sort of prison, a 
house of bondage, or a mere meeting-house with 
short intervals between long services, or something 
equally wide of the mark; but then it is not a 
home. And we may think, as we strive to do our 
duty by our children in some ruthless way which 
robs their childhood of its purest joy, that they will 
rise up to call us blessed when they see the end of 
all our labor ; but this is just what they will not do : 
the judgment day is sure to come when we stand or 
fall by what is written, or is not written, in the book 
of the life of our boys and girls. John Mill had 
this ruthless way with his boy, John Stuart Mill : 
he would make a great man of him. He made the 
man, but he lost the child because he let him have 
no due childhood ; and there is no sadder strain to 
me in modern biography than the condemnation 
which is never quite uttered, but is always felt, in the 
story of this great man's life. It is the resentment 
of a soul robbed of its birthright to the joy which 
waits for us in the morning world. It is the same 
truth, again, in the life of Charles Dickens. The boy 
was robbed of his childhood, as it seems, through 
the general worthlessness of his father. He would 
fain have left this out, I trust, when he came to tell 
his own story, for those are still the noblest sons 
who will go backward, and cover their fathers* 
shame ; but there was no way round it, and so with 
a sad sincerity the man has to tell the truth ; and 



46 The Burden of an Old Song. 



there it stands, the instance of millions of unwritten 
lives of the same sunless quality which cast their 
shadows over old men's graves. The same sad truth 
is revealed again in the autobiography of Harriet 
Martineau. I say again, then, the axiom waits on a 
condition. I may hope for a verdict of " not guilty " 
from any quarter sooner than from these boys and 
girls of mine, if I filch from them this one gift. 
They are that other self with which I cannot tam- 
per ; a projection of my conscience which has 
gone quite beyond my control : so they may stand 
on the crest-line of forty years, and say in their 
hearts, " My father wronged me : he robbed me of 
what is best in the best days I shall ever see." 

But, if this is true of the shadow, it is true also 
of the light. No man need fear, or woman, that 
because their home is not ample, or the life of 
their children one of ease and plenty, they will not 
look back to the old place with infinite affection, 
if by all means in our power we let them have 
their childhood. We may have to face hard work 
and pinching times; but when we all face them 
together, let in all the sun there is anywhere about, 
and give it out of our hearts as well as take it out 
of the heavens, there can be but one issue, and 
that will be just the best we can long for. 

The poor little fellow who came back to the 
work-house with his heart in his eyes had this one 
blessing, and no more, — all the love there was in 



The Burden of an Old Song. 4 7 

one very simple-minded woman, all the brightness 
that love could compass, and the better half of a 
dry crust ; but thirty years after it was all over, and 
the arms which had held him were dust, the rusty 
little grate became as the censer which held the 
fire in the old days on God's altars, and the gaunf, 
bare building as the temple on Zion. I think, 
indued, this love for the old home is very often 
deepest and purest in those who have had the hard- 
est times : if we have fought through them in some 
bright, good way, and let the children have their 
childhood, it is not a sentiment then so much as 
the grain of our life. And we may think the chil- 
dren cannot understand it, or don't care : they can 
understand it, and they do care. The making of 
many a man has lain in the seeming failure of his 
poor striving father : it is not a matter of the mind, 
but of the instincts. We talk about chivalry : there 
never was a knight, since knighthood was heard of, 
who could answer to the cry of distress more brave- 
ly than that boy of yours who hears you tell some- 
times how hard the world is on you, or who sits in 
his home with only " God and his mother." So 
wealth and ease, if we are not wise, may act as non- 
conductors to isolate us from these fine currents of 
feeling and sympathy on which young souls grow 
quick and tremulous, while poverty and striving 
may deepen and intensify this everlasting love. 
There were homes in this world thirty or forty years 



48 TJie Burden of an Old Song. 



ago, bare of all things but this one secret : they are 
the dearest places on earth to-day to men and 
women who have every thing they want. There are 
such homes now, with hard times and hard toil for 
their lot, but the children have their childhood, and 
the best chance there is at their bit of joy ; and in 
forty years from now these will rank many a home 
on the avenues of our great cities in their wealth of 
loving memories. 

I note again that this is not a hard problem to 
solve, or a lottery in which we may win or lose by 
a turn of the wheel of fortune. It is one of the 
simplest things in the world ; and it is this, that to 
the children we shall maintain a childlike heart and 
mind. The way to rob children of their childhood, 
and bring them to say some day, " There is no 
place like home " in a very sad and bitter sense, as 
I have said before, is to have our grown-up theories 
all laid out in line and square for the mind, the 
heart, and the soul, and then cut away at the little 
things as if they were so many plants in an old 
Dutch garden. They must go to bed at such a 
minute by the clock, and rise at sucl a minute ; go 
to bed in the dark perhaps, and never mind the 
ghosts, because we don't mind them : they have 
skipped us, it may be, through some mystery ot 
grace, so that we never did care about them any 
more than a cast-steel anvil does ; but that boy of 
mine may care very much, because the ghosts of 



The Burden of an Old Song. 49 

forty centuries have got themselves tangled in his 
delicate little brain. Then they must bathe to suit 
us, and eat to suit us, work at their books to suit 
us, and play to suit us, sit just so at the table and 
by the fireside, and be seen but not heard when 
there is company, be so far along in their studies 
by such a time, and conform strictly to our idea of 
the studies, and so on to the end of the long, dreary 
chapter. We allow no room for the free play of 
their own primitive nature ; no headway or leeway 
we have not settled beforehand. If we are free- 
thinkers, they must be free-thinkers too ; or, if we 
are Unitarians, we cannot imagine how they can be 
Catholics or Quakers. They must conform, in a 
word, to our ideas, though, in the marrow of oui 
bones, we are nonconformists of the last distillation. 
Now, there never was a man in the world, worth his 
jalt, who could look back to a childhood like this 
with a pure delight : the unfallen angel within 
him must bear witness against it forever. He 
may be so noble that a whisper of what he has 
lost shall never reach the world ; he may hide it 
even from himself, and try to say it was all right : 
but for the world, if he is a man of sense and grace, 
he would not impose such a grown-up childhood 
on his own children. He knows what he has 
missed, and they must never know what he knows. 
So the open secret is this, I say, that we shall think 
more of the child than we do of the way, allow to 



50 The Burden of an Old Song. 



the uttermost for the primitive quality and intention 
of his nature ; take note, above all things, of these 
tender and sensitive beings God has given into our 
hands, not to fit our theories, but to answer to his 
spirit. We must be childlike with them, which 
does not mean at all we shall be childish. They 
need guidance and correction, education and in 
spiration ; but men and women of the simplest and 
kindliest turn, who withal are wise and strong, al- 
ways do this best. What they do not need is to be 
made old in their youth, to grow to settled patterns, 
to be not children, but machines. " Woe unto that 
man who shall so offend one of these little ones ! it 
were better that a millstone were hung about his 
neck, and he were cast into the depths of the sea," 
than that he should hang such a millstone about the 
necks of these free souls fresh from the heart of 
God. 

If, again, we are faithful to the children in this 
simple, kindly way, this is what we may expect : 
that a good home now will create others like it in 
the time to come. Good homes are like good 
apple-trees, — they propagate after their kind. 
What you see in New England in one era, you see 
in Minnesota in another ; and what you see in 
Cork and Connaught to-day, you see to-morrow on 
Goose Island, or on the patch skirting your town. 
When I make a home my children will love to think 
of in forty years, I make what they will have made 



The Burden of an Old Song, 51 

then out of their loving memory. If you could 
search out all the colonies which have swarmed 
from a place like Nantucket, you would be sure to 
find the same clean home-life you find there ; with 
wider margins and more opulent tendencies, to be 
sure, but still the same organic life. And so it is 
everywhere and with us all. When we wonder, 
then, how the homes will look in which our chil- 
dren will live when we are dead, or think we would 
like to come back and look at them, if we are true 
to these simple lessons and laws, here is the glass : 
we just glance round our own home, and there we 
are. It will be about the same home we are look- 
ing at: they will be talking about us as we talk 
about those who have gone to their rest ; they will 
have to fight the same battles, and to meet the 
same trials, — for one thing happeneth to all, — and 
the same old light will shine, and the same old joy 
pulse, through the place ; the grand factor will be 
this we have now in our hand, and home will an- 
swer to home like the cups in a honeycomb ; or, 
if things go harder with some of the children than 
they go with us, and they never realize such a 
home, still what we give them will bless them aU 
their days : the vision will abide when the reality is 
lost, and the vision will be the diviner reality, be- 
cause the things which are not seen are eternal. 
Howard Payne was living in a garret in Paris, on 
the edge of starvation ; and there came to him a 



52 The Burden of an Old Song. 

vision of the old home ; and he sang it out of his 
heart, and wist not what he was doing, never dream- 
ing for an instant that what he learnt in suffering he 
should teach in song, and become immortal ; but so 
it was. This burden came to him then, " There is 
no place like home ; " and then, I suppose, he did 
not feel the hunger, or see the garret ; and the tears 
would fall on the paper, and the hand would trem- 
ble, as he drew the picture after the pattern he had 
seen in the mount. The rivers ran flashing in the 
sun, the uplands were green again, the streets were 
peopled afresh, the old chimes of Trinity smote his 
heart, and within the vision there was one fireside, 
and voices and presences : he was in the old home 
again, and God made his cup run over. 

Then, as the homes grow sacred, the land will 
grow sacred \ for these are not one thing, and this 
another. You shall belt a land with fortresses, and 
she will still be as weak as Taunton Water if the 
homes are not fastnesses of a strong manhood; 
and build churches that will make the land glori- 
ous by their beauty, and " get up " revivals that 
shall fill them with devotees ; yet if in your home 
there is not some such life as I have tried to open, 
if you raise your children to be slaves to an ism, 
the day will come when your religion will be litt'e 
better than a fight of kites and crows. Ichabod 
will be written on the key-stone of the temples, and 
the Christ will weep again, and cry, " If thou hadst 



The Burden of an Old Song. 53 

known, even thou, in this thy day, the things which 
belong to thy peace." 

But let us be sure of this, and then this land we 
live in will grow all sacred by reason of these true 
homes. One shall be salt with the spray of the At- 
lantic, and another of the Pacific ; but they shall 
open into each other, and be one. Or one shall be 
falling back into ruins as you see them here and 
there in the New Hampshire wilderness, — the old 
folks dead and gone, the children moved away 
where a new home shall be growing to a larger 
and finer fitness,— but the long and touching tradi- 
tion shall make the old home beautiful ; the chil- 
dren's ch^iren will go back to hur»t up the old 
cellar and the spring, to bring a blossom from the 
door-yard which has managed to fight the wilder- 
ness and hold its own until the right man comes to 
look for it in the light of the old days, and say to 
the strangers, " This was our place once : here was 
our hearth-stone, and yonder are our graves." 



REFERRING BACK. 



" The year's at the spring, 
And day's at the morn ; 
Morning's at seven ; 
The hillside's dew-pearled; 
The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn : 
God's in his heaven, 
All's right with the world ! " 

Pippa Passes. 



REFERRING BACK. 



I want in this chapter to tell what one (if my 
children used to call "a truly story." 

It came to me one day when I went on a pil- 
grimage to a huge old factory in the valley of the 
Washburne, in Yorkshire, in the summer of 1865. 
I wandered about in a kind of dream. The hand- 
ful of people left there then were at work among 
the wheels and spindles, watching me between 
whiles ; for strangers seldom came to that remote 
place, and I was clearly a stranger ; and then, my 
dress was not what they were used to, especially 
my American " wide-awake." They were as strange 
to me as I was to them. There was not a face I 
knew, not one. And yet this was where I was once 
as well known to everybody as the child is to its 
own mother, and where I knew everybody as I 
knew my own kinsfolk; for it was here that I 
began my life, and lived it for a space that now 

57 



58 



Referring Back. 



seems a lifetime all to itself. And this brings me 
to my dream. 

I saw, in one of the great dusty rooms of the 
factory, a little fellow about eight years old, but big 
enough to pass for ten, working away from six 
o'clock in the morning till eight at night, tired 
sometimes almost to death, and then again not tired 
at all, nishing out when work was over, and, if it 
was winter, home to some treasure of a book. 
There were " Robinson Crusoe," and Bunyan's 
" Pilgrim," and Goldsmith's Histories of England 
and of Rome, the first volume of " Sandford and 
Merton," and one or two more that had something 
to do with theology ; but it must have been meat for 
strong men, for not one of the brood of children 
who read the stories, and the Goldsmith that was 
just as good as stories, would ever touch these 
others after one or two trials. 

One of these books that used to lead all boys 
captive in those good old days, this boy I saw in 
my dream would hug up close to his bowl of por- 
ridge, and eat and read ; and then would read 
after he had done eating, while ever the careful 
»iouse- mother would allow a candle or a coal. But 
if it was summer, the books would be neglected, 
and the rush would be out into the fields and 
lanes, hunting in the early summer for birds' nests, 
the tender and holy home canon would never 
permit to be robbed, and it was always obeyed ; or, 



Referring Back. 



59 



in the later summer, seeing whether the sloes were 
turning ever so little from green to black, or whether 
the crabs (of the wood, not the water) were vulner- 
able to N a boy's sharp and resolute teeth, and when 
the hazel-nuts would be out of that milky state at 
which it would be of any use to pluck them, and 
what was the prospect for hips and haws. 

The men who profess to know just how we are 
made, as a watchmaker knows a watch, tell us that 
once in seven years we get a brand-new body ; that 
the old things pass away in that time, and all things 
become new. I wonder sometimes if it is not so 
with our life. Is not that new as well as the frame ? 
There I was that day, a gray-haired minister from a 
city which had been born and had come to its great 
place since the small lad began to work in the old 
mill as I saw him at the end of a vista of four 
and thirty years. 

1 watched him with a most pathetic interest. 
" Dear little chap," I said, " you had a hard time ; 
but then it was a good time, too — wasn't it, now ? 
How good bread and butter did taste, to be sure, 
when half a pound of butter a week had to be 
divided among eight of us, and the white wheaten 
bread saved for Sunday ! Did ever a flower in this 
world beside smell as good as the primrose, or 
prima donna sing like the sky-lark and throstle? 
Money cannot buy such a Christmas-pudding, or 
tears or prayers such a Christmas-tide, as the 



6o 



Referring Back, 



mother made and the Lord gave when you and 
the world were young. Seven years you stuck to 
the old mill, and then you were only fifteen ; and 
then, just as they were crowning the Queen, you 
know, you had to give it up, and to give the home 
up with it; to go out, and never return to stay. 
And so I lost sight of you out of that hard but 
blessed life in and out of the factory, and have 
never set eyes on you until to-day, ■ — you dear lit- 
tle other one, that was dead and is alive again, was 
lost and is found. " That was how I came to think 
of my story, and how I might tell it as a word of 
encouragement *:o many who may need such a word, 
about the way of life which I have travelled many 
miles since I set out, not knowing whither I went, 
to the pulpit and pastorate of Unity Church. 

But I cannot tell the story I want to tell, if I let 
myself drift away just here from the boy in the 
mill on the Washburne, and say no more about 
him. I like him well enough, after all these years, 
to stay beside him a little longer ; and, beside this, 
he had a great deal to do with the making of as 
much of a man as is now at the other end of this 
pen. I notice in Bunyan's "Pilgrim," how all the 
characters that great dreamer creates are so far hard- 
ened in the mould before he lets us see them, that 
we feel all the time it is a foregone conclusion. 
Obstinate, Pliable, Ignorance, and the rest on that 
side, are bound to come to .grief ; while Christian, 



Referring Back. 



Hopeful, and Faithful are sure to reach the Sliming 
City, do matter what may befall Something like 
this is true of our common life. Before we oegin 
to live to much purpose anyway, the thin^-a are 
gathered and laid up that are to make or m^i us. 
We are not aware of it, any more than the young 
birds, as they flutter out of the nest to do for them- 
selves, are aware how they will be sure to find out 
when to go North or South, and how to build and 
line their own nests, and where and what to seek 
for their callow brood . But it is all there . Nature 
has taken care of that ; and Nature and Provi- 
dence do together for the fledging child what Na- 
ture alone does for the bird. I have heard that 
the nuns who teach in convent schools say, " Let 
as have the Protestant child until it is seven years 
old, and then we have no fear for the future : it is 
sure to come at last into the Church." I imagine 
as a rule, this is true ; and usually, when Prot- 
estant parents pay for the education of their chil- 
dren in those schools, they pay for an item that 
is not in the bill, — their conversion to Romanism. 
It has been noticed, too, how when German chil- 
dren come here from the Fatherland, and eagerly 
turn to the English tongue, giving up their native 
speech, it is no matter how long they live in that 
habit, if the old man, who has not spoken a word 
of German since he was a child, loses himself in 
his last moments, he then goes back to the other 



02 



Referring Back. 



self, — the fellow of the one I saw in the old mill, 
— and talks German again. So the poor old 
knight whose life as a man had been one great, 
gluttonous sin, forgot for a moment on his death- 
bed his own awful remorse, and the blasting of his 
hopes by the breath of the king, and babbled of 
green fields where he had wandered, no doubt, as 
an unfallen child, to gather king-cups and daisies, 
and chase the rabbit to its burrow. 

That grand and hearty Englishman, Sydney Smith, 
used to laugh at ancestral pride, and to say the 
Smith crest, with which all their letters were sealed, 
was the Smith thumb. I cannot laugh with the 
lord of laughter there. I would be glad to know 
that I came of a great line, if it had been God's 
will. 

About a year ago, there was a paragraph in the 
papers, of a murder in San Francisco, I read again 
and again with a wonderful interest. Col. Fair- 
fax, so the papers said, had been stabbed in the streets 
of that city, by some wretch, for a fancied injury. 
The murdered man had strength enough left to 
draw his revolver, and cover his assassin, who then 
begged abjectly for mercy ; when the dying victim 
said quietly, " You have killed me, and I can kill 
you ; but I spare you, villain and coward as you 
are, for the sake of your wife and little children." 
If I were not myself, I would love to be the Fair- 
fax who should succeed that noble fellow, not alone 



Referring Back. 



for the splendid piece of chivalry, of which there 
was never more need than there is now, — the 
grace, I mean, of forbearance unto death in the 
face of the worst injury one man can inflict on 
another ; not for this alone, but because that man 
was the last of a mighty line, whose name was the 
pride of all the boys of my companionship, and 
whose great mansion once nestled on the southern 
and sunny side of the high land which gave us 
only its northern shoulder. We were proud of, the 
Fairfax line. It had disappeared from the country 
many a year before I was born ; but the tradition 
was strong of the great Sir Thomas, who fought with 
Cromwell for the people against the king. And 
we preserved one tradition of him, how his arm was 
so long, that, when he stood stretched to his full 
height, the palm of the hand rested on the cap of the 
knee ; and in some skirmish, also unrecorded, when 
our hero was met alone in one of our narrow lanes 
by eight or ten of the enemy, and it was one down 
and another come up, — Sir Thomas, by favor of 
his long arm and stout heart, cut down about half 
the number; and the rest galloped away. That 
Fairfax was a great figure in our juvenile Valhalla. 
He was one of a line of noble men, with a few ex- 
ceptions, which had housed itself there at Denton for 
many hundreds of years. It saw good reason finally 
for settling in Virginia; gave a great friend to 
Washington, but not to the infant Republic ; and 



6 4 



Referring Back. 



so came down to the man murdered on the Pacific 
coast. Pride in an ancestry like this, it must be 
good to feel. I think that man remembered he 
was a Fairfax, and must not stain his name with 
murder for murder; and that had something to 
do with his noble forbearance. He must die like 
a Fairfax. Such persons bring with them into 
the world a vast advantage over the common run 
of us. Their organism is like the organ of a great 
maker, — something unique for its sweetness or 
strength \ and the soul, like a great organist, makes 
a music that is all its own. I think we would all, 
please God, belong to a line like this. It is some- 
thing still in our life, like the separate line of David, 
by which should be born, in the fulness of time, the 
greatest of all the figures in human history. But 
when that cannot be, what we may all be glad and 
proud of is a line that is good as far as it goes. 
This is the way I feel about the little man who was 
to w r orry out of that factory somehow into a pul- 
pit The line began with the father and mother. 
There was a grandfather who fought under Nelson, 
and went overboard, one black night, in a storm : 
he was on the father's side. And then, on the 
mother's side, there was another sailor, who went 
down the sea in a ship that never came up again. 
Then there were two widows who fought the wolf 
while they were able, and died presently of the 
fight. 



Referring Back. 



Then, as the century was coming in, Yorkshire, 
with its great mills, began to be to the South of 
England what the Far West has been to the East 
here in our day, — the land of promise to all who 
wanted to better themselves. So a bright orphan- 
lad in London and a lass in Norwich heard of it, 
and were caught by that impulse to get out of the 
land of their kindred, which caught their son, many 
a year after, and swept him over the Atlantic ; and 
I have no doubt, from what I have heard them say, 
they were after that quite of the mind of the old 
ballad : — 

" York, York, for my monie : 
Of all the places I ever did see. 
This is the best for good companie, 
Except the city of London." 

So what a boy saw, when he began to notice, 
was a woman, tall and deep-chested, with shining 
flaxen hair, and laughing blue eyes, a damask rose- 
bloom on her cheek, — as is the way with the 
women of her nation, — a laugh that was music, 
too, and a contagion of laughter you could not 
escape was at the heart of it ; a step like a deer 
for lightness, and an activity that could carry its 
possessor twenty miles a day over the rough north- 
ern hills, and land her safe home in the evening, 
ho more tired than one of our fashionable ladies in 
Chicago would be in going from cellar to garret 
in her own home. Woman's rights, as a natural 



66 



Referring Back. 



truth, must have come to me by my mother. 1 
believe, as I sit and think of her wonderful genius 
for doing whatever she took in hand, if she had 
been told to do it by her sense of duty, and then 
the way had opened, she would have led an army 
like the old queens, or governed a kingdom. What 
she did govern was a houseful of great, grow- 
ing, hungry, out-breaking bairns, — keeping us all 
well in hand, smiting all hinderance out of our way, 
keeping us fed and clad bravely, and paying for 
school, as long as we could be spared to go, out of 
the eighteen shillings a week the quiet manful 
father made at his anvil. The kindest heart that 
ever beat in a man's breast, I think, was his. It 
stopped beating in a moment, one hot July day ; 
and, before any hand could touch him, he was in 
"the rest that remains." But in those brave old 
days, while the first fifteen years were passing which 
do so much for us all, there we were all together in 
one of the sweetest cottage homes that ever nestled 
under green leaves in a green valley. There was a 
plum-tree, and a rose-tree, and wealth of ivy, and 
a bit of greensward, outside ; and inside, one 
room on the floor, and two above ; a floor of flags 
scoured white, so that you might eat your dinner 
on it, and no harm be done except to the floor ; 
walls whitewashed to look like driven snow, with 
pictures of great Bible figures hung where ther3 was 
room, and in their own places, kept so bright as to 



Referring Back. 



'5? 



be so many dusky mirrors ; the great mahogany 
chest of drawers and high-cased clock ; polished 
elm chairs, and corner cupboard for the china which 
was only got out at high festivals ; a bright, open, 
sea-coal fire, always alight, winter and summer ; 
with all sorts of common things for common use 
stowed away snug and tight in their own corners, 
like the goods and chattels of Ed'ard Cuttle, mari- 
ner. That was the home in the day of small 
things, when the world was young and the glory of 
life was in its first soring. 



WILD LILIES. 



Consider tne lines of the field. 59 

Sermon on the Mount. 



WILD LILIES. 



The commentators are a great deal troul led 
about the special flower Jesus had in his mind ; 
but, when you follow them through thf reports of 
travellers and missionaries, this seems to be the 
general conclusion, that in any case it was a wild 
flower. It is evident also, that there were then, as 
now, over there, a great many varieties of wild 
lilies, two of which are selected for special com- 
ment,— one hedged about with thorns so that you 
cannot reach it except at the risk of tearing your 
fingers ; while the other grows among the wheat 
and barley, is looked on by the farmers with great 
disfavor, and is plucked up by the roots, bound into 
bundles, and burnt. One of these, it is imagined, 
was meant ; and this may be the truth, while it is 
possible he did not mean this or that particular 
flower, but the whole wealth of wild lilies with 
which they were familiar. Here they were grow- 



72 



Wild Lilies, 



ing all about him in the woods and pastures, and 
among the corn ; things of no account, if a gleam 
of beauty is of no account, and a touch of fragrance ; 
wild, in the way very often, and mere weeds to be 
mown down with the briars, or plucked from 
among the growing wheat and burnt. But within 
the worthlessness he found a worth. These wild 
things also are of God, he says, and from God. Of 
no worth to you, they are of so much worth to him 
that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed 
like one of these. You want them out of the way : 
He put them in the way, and loves what at the best 
you merely tolerate, or why should he have cast 
such a wealth of beauty and fragrance into their 
cups? 

And we find the key to the lesson of the lilies, 
as we try to identify ourselves with the men 
and women to whom he was speaking that day. 
He was speaking tc them about their life ; and it 
was a life in which they would at the best be in- 
clined to feel that they were of no great account. 
They were people who had to take hold of humble 
tasks to earn their bread, and to work at them with 
very scant encouragement. And there were hard 
times for them in those days, as there are in these, — 
worse, indeed, than any that we can we'i imagine ; 
so that now and then they must have been quite 
fortunate if they did not feel they were rather in 
the way, and the world would be better without 



Wild Lilies. 



73 



them. They were more fortunate, also, than some 
are now, if they did not feel sometimes, that their 
poor obscure lot was, on the whole, about as good 
as they had any right to expect, because of a certain 
wild and weedy quality in their nature, out of which 
they could never hope to rise into any great worth, 
either to themselves or to the world about them. 
For there is only here and there a man who will 
not be content to take his hard fortune quietly, and 
will keep up a steady revolt against it, and look out 
for better days. To most men, and especially to 
those who are born to toil on a low plane where 
the chances for rising are hardly worth counting, 
it is about as it has been with your Saxon serf in 
England for a thousand years, — " a long mechanic 
pacing to and fro, a gray set life and apathetic 
end." And what can be more natural in such a 
case, than the dull and heavy feeling that you are 
of no more account to Heaven than you are to 
earth ? — a thing to God as you are to man, in the 
way in the higher as in the lower life, and bound 
to take what comes, for this has all been settled 
where there is no appeal. It is not hard to realize 
that this was the kind of company over whose hard 
and poor lot the tender heart of Christ was yearn- 
ing. He meets them on their own ground, and 
opens to them the lesson of the lilies. They are 
of no account, he says, — wild things, and in the 
way. They are mown down, and pulled up and 
consumed, and you think there is good riddance. 



74 



Wild Lilies. 



But now just look at the cup of that wild lily 
Did any whiteness in the palace of Solomon, or 
any purple he ever wore, touch the pure splendor 
of those petals ? Was any silk ever equal to their 
sheen, or fretted gold equal to that you will find in 
their heart, or any line of beauty man ever drew 
equal to the curve from the base to the edge of 
that cup, or any incense equal to their perfume ? 
No man cares for them, but do you see how God 
cares? He gave them their beauty and sweetness, 
and maintains them in the world against all oppo- 
sition, for he must and will have wild lilies. 

And so you will see from this brief word of lilies 
first, and then of those to whom Jesus speaks, what a 
large and gracious meaning stays within his thought. 
For the beauty and worth of it, as of so much 
beside in his gospel, lies just here, that he does not 
seem to care either for the lilies or the lives on 
which the grace of God seems to be stamped so 
clearly that you have no doubt about it when you 
see them ; but leaves these to speak for themselves, 
and takes up those that need such an advocate 
and interpreter before they can come home to us 
in their true worth. 

Because this is the simple truth, that there was a 
great wealth of lilies in the world that day, which 
held in their cup the culture of all the centuries 
since God put man in a garden to dress it, — 
flowers about which men were busy, no doubt. 



Wild Lilies. 



75 



as they are now, selecting and arranging in orders 
of nobility, over which they were wondering, and 
singing praises because of their exceeding beauty 
and sweetness, and preserving with care in gardens 
and conservatories, as was fitting, to their minds, 
for plants of such rare worth ; Lilies like that out 
of whose cup the sacred books in India say Brahma 
sprung, the oldest of all the sons of God; like 
those Layard found in the royal palaces of Nin- 
eveh ; like that Sir Gardiner Wilkinson copied 
from the brow of an Egyptian beauty, where it 
hangs like a jewel ; and like those Sir William Jones 
was treasuring in his room when a man came to 
see him from Nepaul, and, seeing the flowers, 
bowed before them first, as a devout Catholic 
bows before the host. Some such rare flower 
our divine Teacher might have brought to his dis- 
course, and said to his hearers, " See this now, 
and tell me whether God has not revealed himself 
in all this beauty and worth." But these wild 
things with the thorns about them, on the skirts of 
Mount Tabor, or these others in the standing corn, 
lilies lurking in the meadow-grass, or haunting the 
marshes, and tossing their heads in the wind all 
over the land, of no great worth in any case, and 
usually in the way ; wild things which had never 
been touched by culture, or made sacred in any 
way by the reverence of the centuries, but had just 
taken care of themselves, and, as sure as summer 



76 



Wild Lilies, 



came, had foamed over out of their hiding -places, 
so that those who wanted a land full of good green 
grass and corn would feel a good deal more like 
praying against them than bowing before them 
with the children of the far East, and be more 
ready to believe that the Evil One had hidden in 
their cups, than Brahma, the first incarnation, — 
how could he take these to his heart, and say such 
a sweet, good word about them, that human hearts 
had to treasure it, and write it in a Gospel, and 
send it down through all these ages as the word 
of God? 

And, as he might have chosen his flowers, so 
he might have chosen his company, and been care- 
ful as we are often about narrowing his lessons of 
God's great regard down to those who might well 
be deemed most worthy. For, as there was a favored 
flower, so there was a favored class j and here, no 
doubt, he might have found instances of the worth 
of culture and fortune as proofs of the grace of 
God, as clear and conclusive as those he might 
have selected from the gardens and conservatories, 
— men and women of the rarest beauty and worth 
of life and character, about whose welcome there 
could be no doubt, whose place was assured, and 
vvhose loss to the world would leave a gap which, 
to men's minds, could never be filled ; men and 
women of a distinct genius, whose sermons in the 
temple, or pleas at the bar, or cures in the hospital, 



Wild Lilies. 



77 



or creations in the finer arts, or histories, or poems, 
or stories, mark an era or create a school in the 
history and life of a nation ; or who have such en- 
dowments of goodness or of valor, that they be- 
come saints and heroes by simply living out their 
lives. Very easy it would have been, no doubt, 
even in those barren and dismal days, to point out 
men and women who were the instances to the 
time of these noble orders : or, if there were none 
in life, there were plenty in history to which the no- 
ble heart of the nation would have responded at the 
mere mention of their names, from Abraham down 
to Zachariah who was slain between the temple and 
the altar. No doubt about the place those hold 
in the common estimation, any more than there 
is about the great names in the Poet's Corner at 
Westminster, or the crypt of St. Paul's in Lon- 
don ; grand presences in the nation's history, whose 
names are written in the book of life. But here 
is what you might call a horde of common people, 
fishermen and herdsmen, peasants and 1 publicans, 
persons of no account in the world, and of small 
account even to themselves, whose lot it was, per- 
haps, to draw their first breath in a home where 
they were not very welcome, to whom life from 
their youth had been a hard fight for the survival 
of the fittest, and who must be cut down and con- 
sumed, perhaps, by war or pestilence before they 
had a fair chance to open fully to the world, or be 



7 8 



Wild Lilies. 



hedged about by the thorns of evil circumstances; 
penned up in mean homes, so that they took to 
drink for what seemed like a glimpse of heaven to 
them in the very fires of hell, or were led into evil 
ways by the allurements of passions they had never 
teen taught to curb and guide ; wild things, mak- 
ing their way into life without leave or license, to 
leave it again, and make no sign ; just to reveal a 
touch of beauty to those who had eyes to see it, 
and send some grain of sweetness from among the 
thorns, and then to pass away. And these were the 
men and women to whom Jesus said, " God cares 
for the wild things that are growing all about you J 
and are ye not much better than they? " 

And when we leave them there about the moun- 
tain-side, and bring the truth home to our own life 
and the life of those about us, we can see what a 
divine wisdom there was in this turning away from 
the noblest and best, and touching those on whom 
the world looks with disdain and dislike for the 
lesson of God's grace. For the tendency of our 
time and of all time is to keep this grace in the 
gardens and conservatories of humanity, if I may 
say so, to the exclusion of the wilderness, and to 
believe in him as only revealed in the grandest and 
noblest natures, or, to use the term so common in 
our time, to those who have experienced a change 
of heart, while he cares nothing for those who can 
put forth no such claim, or looks on them with the 



WiM Lilies, 



n 



dislike the farmer feels toward the wild things that 
invade his crops in Syria. But the steady truth 
about all time and the vast preponderance of life is 
this : that while our reverence for a true nobility is 
the proof of a certain nobleness in our own nature, 
and we can never over-estimate the worth of it, or 
the proof it brings home to us of the divine pres- 
ence in this world, yet it is, after all, but as the lilies 
that had grown to their high worth through centu- 
ries of care, in comparison with the wild things that 
were shedding their gleam of beauty and sweetness 
in the corn and over the pastures. And if this great 
mass of humanity, which may well include your life 
and mine, is to have no part or lot in God's love and 
care, then woe worth the world, for it is, on the whole, 
a hideous and haggard failure ! 

For the truth you will find in a great city like 
this of ours is about as good, on the whole, as you 
will find anywhere ; that an enormous majority are 
of no account except as they can reveal some gleam 
of beauty and breath of sweetness by being simply 
what they are, without any radical change at all, — 
not cultured or of a special genius, but of quite the 
common order, with a wild tang and tendency, very 
much in the way sometimes, compelled to make a 
hard fight for existence, cumbering the ground, if 
God wants the whole land this instant for corn and 
timothy, and wants no wild things about. Take this 
city for your instance, and you strike a rather high 



So 



Wild Lilies. 



average for the whole world, and for all time, often 
worse, seldom better. Here and there a man or 
woman of the noblest type, in whom the divine grace 
is not to be mistaken, with a touch of genius in them, 
or heroism, or a touch of pure goodness, caught per- 
haps, if we knew their sec ret, out of centuries of 
cultivation, — choice garden flowers, to whom a reli- 
gious life in some true sense is as natural as sing- 
ing is to a lark. And then, beside these, outside the 
fences of distinction, we put down this whole wild 
growth of us, in the shadow and in the sun, in the 
marshes and by the wayside, not very beautiful and 
not very sweet, except as with the good Christ you 
can make a large allowance, and see the touch of 
God's finger, where most of us are sand-blind to 
such revelation ; the base things of this world, and 
the things that are despised, and the things that are 
not except as God has chosen them ; wild things, that 
have to be got under sometimes in ruthless ways, ai 
they would ruin the hope of the harvest, but which 
still hold a gleam of the divine grace in their heart, 
and a breath of the sweetness coming forth from 
God, though the whole Church say they are of the 
Devil, and going back to God as the sole heart that 
can understand them and take them in. 

This is the large general truth ; and then, within 
this, I find a truth which is more special and personal, 
which I do well to lay to my heart and to believe, — 
that, if I think I am of the garden, it will be a good 



Wild Lilies. 



8 s 



thing for me to look through the bars sometimes to 
those who are in the wilder reaches, as the Christ 
did, and consider them in the light of his gospel ten- 
derly, and to remember that just as I exclude them 
from God's regard, I am unworthy the name Chris- 
tian. He met such men and women frankly, and 
treated them with a divine regard, and would have 
them be true to their own better nature ; and then 
he was content, because I suppose he understood 
how God had ordained wild things, and made room 
for them, and touched them with beauty and a fra- 
grance of their own, and bid them occupy until he 
comes to bring in the nobler order, and the better 
day. 

Or if I feel, as well I may, that there is a wild 
quality in my own nature and condition, and that 
I am of the wilderness rather than the garden, 
common and unnoted, in the way sometimes, and 
beset by the thorns of harsh and evil circumstances, 
and so disheartened at my poor, low place, and at 
the little I can do to amend things, let me think of 
these wild things in the pasture on Mount Tabor, 
with the thorns about them, and how they manage 
somehow, after all, to keep sweet about the heart, 
and to maintain the upward look, and the color 
which gleams like a glimpse of heaven ; and then 
listen for the word of Christ, " Consider the lilies," 
and so believe that I am very near and very dear 
to God, when all is said and done ; and I can do my 



82 



Wild Lilies. 



best ; and be my best, can keep the touch of sweet- 
ness in my heart, and the upward look from among 
the thorns, and be patient and not over-troubled 
about what is going to happen to me, for the wil- 
derness is God's land as certainly as the garden, 
and is better beyond all telling, even for wild 
things, than it could be as a blank desolation. 

I am here for some true use, or I should not be 
here in the divine economy ; and the one thing I 
know is that I must be my own true self, and then 
there will be a better for me, climbing always 
toward the best. The one thing I must not do is 
to grow sour and sad, and hang my head until it i? 
soiled with the mud, or let the thorns have it all 
their own way ; for how many men and women I 
have seen, who have lost their chance through this 
deliberate downward dip ! and how many I have 
seen beset with thorns, obscure and of no account 
to the world, who were still sweet and good at the 
heart when you once got at them, with gleams of 
.the very grace of heaven shining in and through 
them, wild witnesses for God in the thick of harsh 
and evil surroundings where he wants wild wit- 
nesses ! 

If I have those very dear to me, who take to 
wild ways while still, after all, as so often happens, 
there is a real native grace in them, and goodness ; 
who can not and will not conform to the order of 
my home, or after all my care and pains will not 



Wild Lilies. 



83 



stay in my church, but take up with what seems to 
me to be a wild idea, in which, as I think, there 
can be no help to the soul, and so bring me trouble 
and dismay instead of the blessing I expected, — 
let me then consider the lilies, and God's hand in 
them, and his care for them, and sorrow not as 
those that have no hope. It is right that I should 
be true to my own light and my own nature, and 
look to those who are to me as my own life to be 
like me ; but my nature may be one thing, and 
theirs quite another, and then all I can do is to 
help them to be and to do their best under the 
new order. How many children have been lost, 
who would have been saved if fathers and mothers 
had understood this secret of the new and wild 
variety, and made a large allowance for the dif- 
ference they could not understand ! — the sons 
of ministers, and members in good standing, and 
widowed mothers who were left to train them the 
best they knew ; wild boys, but not wicked, the old 
Berserker blood afire again in their veins, plunging 
into the strong floods of life while the guardians 
believe only in the quiet eddies, — told sternly 
that this is all godless and the way to hell, until 
they believe it, but do not care, and then told of 
God's hatred until they hate in return, or sink into 
a blank and utter atheism. In no one thing I can 
ever encounter do I need so much this large look 
of Christ as when I have raised a wild boy, and 



84 



Wild Lilies. 



must still have the grace to make him believe in 
himself, and become the best he can be, and to 
believe that God cares for wild boys as he cares for 
wild lilies, and will still be with him to challenge 
him, and help him to master the thorns, and grow 
sweet and good through it all. Multitudes of men 
have been lost for the want of it, killing out the 
last germs of self-respect, and saying, " God has no 
place in his providence for such as you : your end 
is to be damned." We want the whole world we 
care for most, to be of the garden. It never has 
been so, and, until the whole race has risen into the 
better life, never can be. But, when those that are 
very near and dear to us take to these ways, we can 
do our best for them, and not break our hearts 
about it, when we believe with Jesus that God has a 
purpose for the children of the wilderness as surely 
as the children of the garden and the conservatory ; 
that the noblest were wild once, and the wildest 
will grow noble at last through the divine grace 
and our own true endeavors. 

And I must be sure of this finally, that this whole 
world is God's world, and all this pottering about 
the way in which he must stand related to us and 
we to him, because we believe certain dogmas and 
observe certain ordinances of this or that church, is 
time thrown away, except as it can result in making 
me a better man all round and all through ; and I 
desire to speak in no narrow spirit when I say that 



Wild Lilies, 



through these means of grace, as they are called, this 
does not often happen. It is the contact of the 
divine soul with our own, as the sun smites the lilies, 
and the rain and dew touch them from cup to root ; 
the love of God shed abroad in the heart, as the 
Scripture says ; and the love of God is the love of 
goodness. This is God's world ; and as it stands to- 
day he needs men in it to run with a fire-engine, as 
certainly as he needs men to preach in pulpits, and 
set broken limbs ; to do the rough work, as surely 
as the fine work. And as men are made they are 
pretty sure to take a tang from the nature of the 
work they have to do, or to bring one with them 
as the ;uy condition of their taking hold; just as 
Esau was a wild man, and a hunter, and JacQb a 
very tame man, and kept sheep. This is God's 
world, and he needs all kinds, and will- have them ; 
and when we come to look on his world with this 
wide and gracious glance out of the heart of Christ, 
we shall not be over-troubled about what is going 
to happen to-morrow, if we manage to do our part 
to-day. It was in his hands before we came, and 
it will be in his hands when we have gone away ; 
and his tender mercies are over all his works, and 
all his children. 



THE PARABLE OF THE 
PRODIGAL. 



" How many a father have I seen, 
A sober man among his boys, 
Whose youth was full of foolish noise, 
Who wears his manhood hale and green ! 

In 



THE PARABLE OF THE 
PRODIGAL SON. 



The human touches in the story of tLd prodigal 
make one feel sure of its essential reality. Jesus 
must have known the family, or heard of it in some 
near and neighborly way, so that all he had to do, 
I suppose, was to take this bit of nature and life 
for a key to open the truth, and urge home its les- 
son on those about him. 

The young man lives in a kindly country-home, 
with his father, and an elder brother of another turn. 
There is no sign of a mother or sisters ; and this 
at the first glance seems to be a great pity, and stirs 
the wonder whether the story in that case might not 
have taken another turn. It might, and then it 
might not : that would depend in part on the youth 
himself. If I want to have my fling at the swine- 
troughs, I shall either get it by breaking away openly 
from the pure and good women of my house, or by 

89 



90 The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 



trying to live two lives, — one clean and good in my 
home, the other unclean and evil in the dens of vice. 
This is what a great many young men do here in 
America, with as true a womanhood to guard and 
guide them as the world ever saw: so it is fair to 
infer, that, if this young man once made up his mind 
to do it, he would put himself down on the Devil's 
books in despite of the best women who ever blessed 
and sanctified a home. 

The old father is clearly as good a man, in his 
own way, as you could well find • bound up in his 
boy, as Jacob was in Joseph. We can see this as 
we watch him open his heart to the poor wretch 
when he comes back, and take him in again with- 
out question or condition. Nothing can be more 
sweet and tender than his joy. There is no time 
now for even a glance of reproof : the best he has 
left is poured out on him without stint ; the ward- 
robe is ransacked, and the jewel-box, the cellar, and 
the fold, to set forth the old man's gladness ; neigh- 
bors and friends are called in, and music and dan- 
cing crown the holiday on which the dead has come 
to life again, and the lost is found. And as I watch 
him through the mists of time, standing there 
trembling all over with delight, I can imagine I 
hear him say to himself, " What a fool I have been ! 
If I had made the old place as bright as this for my 
boy before he went away, he might never have 
gone : at any rate, it would have been well worth 
the trial." 



The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 91 

For we can guess again, from the elder brother's 
wonder over the music and dancing as he draws 
^near the house, that this was quite a new thing at 
the old farmstead ; and I set no value on his re- 
proach, " Thou never gavest me a kid, that I might 
make merry with my friends," because I conclude 
the last thing he would have thought of doing 
would be to give a feast and a dance. He was 
not that kind of young man at all, not he. From 
the day when he began to do chores, to this day 
when he flings his bitter rebuke, not minding who is 
hurt, father and son have plodded along, quite of 
one mind, prudent, careful, watching the main 
chance, and never thinking of fooling away their 
money and time in any such nonsense, while the 
young man of twenty-five was just as well fitted to 
be an elder in the synagogue as the elder of sixty. 

And here, as I think, we come upon the first 
germ of the trouble and shame so far as the father 
and the home are to blame for it. It was a good 
home, no doubt, in its own quiet way, and he was a 
good father ; but he made the mistake we can make 
now, of training two natures, quite unlike, under 
one law, and concluding that what had proven it- 
self to be a safe and sure rule in his conduct 
touching the elder lad must be equally wise and 
good for the younger. A picnic now and then, 
with the members in good standing; a dinner, 
when the right time came round, to the rabbi and 



92 The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 

his wife, at which they talked over church matters, 
and last Sunday's sermon if they had one, and sang 
the psalms of David for diversion, — these were 
about all the pleasures, I suspect, the old place ever 
knew ; sugar to the senna in the young fellow's life, 
while all the time he would be apt to feel that the 
senna was the main ingredient in the cup, and was 
meant to " do him good." So, if the father had 
not been quite so good a man in one sense, he 
might have been better in another. He would 
have said then, " This boy of mine is not at all 
like his brother : he wants more life and motion, 
and he shall have them. He prefers a ballad to a 
psalm : he shall sing them to his heart's content. 
He is fond of the grace and glamour of the dance, 
and the company of young people of his own turn : 
I will flood the place with music for him on occa- 
sion, and he shall meet all the bright good girls and 
young men I can bring together in our own home, 
to which I will make it worth their while to come." 
Something like this the good man might have done ; 
and then he would have had some chances he 
threw away, of keeping his boy clean and good. 
The first man in this case was of the earth earthy : 
he should have taken care, so far as he was able, it 
was good clean earth the boy would take to, and 
not gutters or marsh-mud. 

And it was not to be expected, that in doing this 
he would have either help or sympathy from his 



The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 93 

elder son, who had nothing in common with the 
young mischief who from his childhood had never 
been on hand when you wanted him, and was for- 
ever upsetting the fine order of the place, leaving 
the gates open, badgering beast and fowl, and tum- 
bling out of fruit-trees at the peril of his bones. 
Their life would be one long fight. But the father 
should have had more sense, and made a fair 
allowance for this ingrain difference of the two 
natures, and said in his heart always, " There may be 
something very good, after all, in this wild boy of 
mine : I will try to find it, and bring it out, and be- 
gin by winning his confidence. All that I have 
shall be his also. We will be lads together. I will 
try to brighten my rusty, work-worn faculties for his 
sake, and enter into the spirit of his play. The 
Devil is waiting to take him with the guile of evil : 
I will be first in the field, please God, and take him 
with the guile of good." If the estate had been in 
such peril, he would have bent all his powers to 
save it : no care would have seemed too heavy, 
night or day. Yet here was bone of his bone, and 
flesh of his flesh, a bright young soul, indeed, in the 
sorest peril ; and it seems he could not leave the 
old ruts in which he had plodded so long, to pluck 
that soul as a brand from the burning. 

And so the old parable forever fits the new time, 
and that home in Syria opens into yours and mine. 
Because my observation of life is not wr;th much 



94 The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 

if this is not the truth, that there are hosts of fa- 
thers still, who watch and tend their investments 
with a great deal more care than they watch and tend 
their sons, and think more of making a fortune 
than they do of making a man. They come into 
our great cities from the rather austere life of the 
home on the hills or by the sea, with great brains 
and strong bodies, plunge into the tides of business 
which surge and swell about us ; bring a wife from 
the old place, who has waited a little too long 
perhaps, while they were getting well started toward 
a fortune, and have about the average we hear 
about in this parable for a family; send the boy 
with a wild tang in him to some outlying school 
with ten dollars for pocket-money where he ought 
to have one ; never weigh the deep difference be- 
between his nature and their own, or between their 
boyhood and his, or lay themselves out wisely to 
win his confidence, trying to be about fifteen to his 
twenty, or twenty to his fifteen, rambling away 
with him, sometimes into the country, walking with 
their arm over his shoulder, opening their own boy- 
hood to him, counting no day perfect which has not 
brought them a little closer to the boy, and no gain 
in their ledger equal to this gain in the book of life. 

Or we may try to do our best for such a boy, 
yet fail of our purpose because we do not under- 
stand how he can have such a keen hunger for a 
good time as he understands the term, and still 



The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 95 

be a good fellow. So his home may be as good in 
its own way as any you will find : the best there is 
in the market on the table, all the standard books 
in the library, and a chamber fit for a prince. But 
does the boy want to hunt or fish, or go to the 
theatre or the opera, he must steal away to do it, 
and then tell a lie, perhaps, to cover his tracks ; cr 
want to go to a ball, he must feel this is about the 
same in his father's eyes as going to a burglary. We 
can make no greater blunder than to handle such 
boys and young men in this way. We ought to 
say, " This son of mine is not after my own heart 
at all ; but he may be after the heart of an intrinsic 
goodness in some way I do not understand. He 
wants life and motion, stirring adventure, and all 
the sunshine there is 011 hand. I will give him 
his fling at the good as near as may be without the 
evil : he shall hunt and fish, and play billiards, if he 
will, in good company. I will get a table into the 
house, learn the play myself, and beat him if I can. 
I like the old books, he likes the new : he shall have 
the brightest and best they are writing. He loves 
the drama : he shall see the noblest and best plays, 
if be will in the best company ; and that may save 
him from what is mean and low if I throw no 
such safeguard about his life." I said just now 
there are young men who will take to evil courses, 
wallow in the filth, and drink the dregs of the cup of 
sin, no matter what you may do to save them ; but 



g6 The Parable of the Prodigal Son, 

this is my conviction, that the vast majority of the 
bright, keen boys who go wrong, might be trained 
to a fair manhood if we would take note of the 
ingrain difference between them and their steady, 
sober brothers, whose life is duty, and their religion 
work. I cannot remember one instance within the 
circle of my own life, where fathers have shown 
this beautiful wisdom which turns back to its own 
youth for the sake of doing all that can be done for 
such boys, in which the result was a dead failure ; 
while I do remember some sad instances in which 
boys of this make who have been kept down stern- 
ly, and denied every innocent amusement which 
was not approved by the sect, or would take time 
or money, breaking away into the wildest" riot, 
spending all the time and money they could com- 
pass, and ruining themselves body and soul, for 
this life at any rate, when they could afford to defy 
the old man, and take their own way. Such youths 
are like the travellers we read about in the deserts, 
who, in their eagerness to drink, come to a mud- 
hole from which men who have plenty of cleai 
spring water would turn away in disgust, but in 
that deadly thirst they plunge up to the neck with 
ti:£ asses and camels, and wallow in the pit with 
ineffable delight. We must let these bright, keer 
natures have their way, then, so long as we know ii 
is a good way, on wide human lines. They will 
work well some day if they can play well now be- 



The Parable of the Prodigal Son, 97 

tween whiles ; satisfy their thirst at the spring, ami 
they will loathe the mud-hole. Let -them hunt, fish, 
dance, see brave sights, play strong games, hold 
honorable intercourse with young folks of their own 
clean bleeding, spend half the money in teaching 
them to swim they may spend some day in sinking ; 
and at twenty-live we may have a man who will bo 
a joy to our failing years, where we might have 
had a broken wreck cast on a lee shore. 

The Italians tell a story of a nobleman who grew 
sick of the world, and especially of the better half 
of it, and retired with his son, then an infant, to 
a castle in the mountains, where no girl or woman 
was ever allowed to come ; and there the child 
grew to be a young man. Then his father ventured 
down with him to a festival at which among many 
other wonders he saw young girls ; and with wide- 
open eyes he whispered to his father, " What are 
they? " — " They are devils, my son," the father 
answered, and thought, no doubt, he had made all 
safe. But as they got ready to go home he said, 
"What is there in the fair you would like?" He 
had seen a lassie of the hills, with a blush on her 
cheek like the Alpine rose, and eyes blue as the 
campanella, who had shot a glance at him, and slain 
him ; and, " O father," he said, " I should so like 
that devil ! " The story is not true, I suppose, in 
fact ; but it is true as earth and heaven can make it 
of life, and most of all this life I have in my mind 



$8 The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 

No use at all our crabbed and cranky wisdom 
no use trying to turn these sweet, strong tides of 
life back upon themselves : as well try to arrest the 
lush up the Bay of Fundy. All we can do, and all 
we should do, is to find safe and clean channels 
for it, and so turn that to blessing which might else 
be the direst curse. 

And, if you say this has nothing at all to do with 
the moral and religious training no man can afford 
to neglect, I answer, once for all, we must take our 
boys as we find them, and make the very best we 
can of them ; and this is the one way to begin with 
such boys, end how we may. Of all things in the 
world, we should be careful how we handle them 
in this great matter, lest we disgust and repel them 
at the veiy portals of the palace of truth and the 
temple of God. The way a good many fathers try 
to instil these high lessons into such sons is very 
much as if in all their food and drink they hid 
some bitter herb. The noblest lessons can be 
taught so that they become at last an intimate part 
of the boy's life, while all this bright breezy work 
goes on I have tried to set forth, as we can see 
in such peerless books as "Tom Brown at Rugby," 
the best book, probably, we can put into the hands 
of such a boy, or read ourselves when we want to 
get the bearings of the work we have to do for him. 
For our wisdom does not lie in wrenching the 
eager young soul out of all its belongings, and so 



The Parable of the Prodigal Son. 99 

making quite another sort of man : it lies in taking 
the temper and quality as we find it, and bringing 
these out at last into all fine uses of which the 
religious life is still the highest and the best. Abso- 
lute truth-telling can be instilled through all the 
play, and the soul of honesty and honor and help- 
fulness in time out of a tender heart, and rever- 
ence for whatsoever things are true and lovely and 
of good report, and the consciousness of the pres- 
ence of God in his life, who can look with a loving 
glance on a boy at play as surely as on a man in a 
prayer-meeting, and does not count such time lost 
as the goody good books do ; and the nearness and 
certainty of tV? V»aven c to which the young heart 
will turn now and tnen out uf ah tne turmoil ; and 
the Christ who could play as a child with children, 
and watch the innocent games of the youth of 
Galilee with no sour or sad glance, though by his 
nature he might have no part or lot in them. Let 
me raise my bright boy in such a good nurture as 
this, and when I am getting through with it all I 
shall surely expect to have a man I can be proud 
of, who has learned at last the great lesson how to 
make the best of his dangerous nature, and to turn 
what might have been a curse into unspeakable 
blessing ; and no human being in the world will 
weep more tender tears over my grave, than the 
lad whose wild but wholesome ways are now turn- 
ing my house upside down. 



SLOW AND SURE. 



' l The evil cannot brook delay : 
The good can well afford to wait." 



SLOW AND SURE. 



I have been touched afresh through my summer 
leisure by the way in which Nature takes her time, 
and uses it so that not a moment seems to be lost, 
or to tread on the heels of the next. The bird 
sat on her nest in the door-yard in Keene, as if 
she was aware that the whole universe was circling 
about her small cup of sticks and straws, and was 
bound to keep faith with her in return for her fidel- 
ity, and bring out the brood ; and up in Wisconsin 
the wild things in the woods and lanes turned to 
the sun, and took their time to ripen, as if they 
knew that all they had to do was just to hold on, 
to lose no instant and hasten none, and then, when 
their day came to fall or be gathered, all the beauty 
and worth of which they were capable would come 
to perfection, and the last day with them would 
jurify all the rest. 

J found that the wise old farmers also, who were 

>°3 



104 



Sloiv and Sure. 



living near to Nature, and watching her ways, had 
caught this truth, and went about their business 
with some such trust in the leisurely result as the 
wild things of the earth and air. So they had no 
complaint to make in this rare year, especially of 
a frustrated purpose, and not much of any year. 
"Take things by and large," they said ; "put the 
best there is in you into what you have to do ; take 
care not to fuss and fume ; and in the long run, if 
you are cut out for a farmer, you will have no cause 
to complain. But then you must be on hand, and 
keep abreast of the occasion : the last place in the 
world to make up for lost time is on a farm, or to 
get much ahead of time, or to win by a spasm 
what can only be won by all the leisure your things 
demand. " Their thought was that Nature is no 
gambler to give you your winnings on a turn of the 
cards, but a steady sequence of seasons opening 
into duties as the plants in the floral clock of Lin- 
naeus opened to the sun. And as under the equator 
the rains pour down in cataracts to fill the Nile at 
length, and duly water each man's patch thousands 
of miles away, so the winds and waters and fires, 
whose springs are in the heart of a mystery no 
man can fathom, circle about the lands, and serve 
each man well who can fall into their harmony, and 
render service for service. 

And so it was natural that one should think of 
some such quiet certainty within our life, wondei 



'Slow and Sure. 



how it is that in great cities especially we do not 
catch the secret of these steady laws, and so free 
ourselves in some fair measure from the fret and 
fever which make such havoc of the best we can 
be or do, — why we do not learn this lesson once 
for all, Nature teaches so kindly if we mind her, 
but so harshly if we neglect her, — that there is no 
juggling anywhere for those who will attain to a 
true success, no gambling, no short cuts, no haste, 
and no delay, when we once enter into the soul of 
things as God has made them, but just a wise and 
quiet persistence in the line of the law by which 
we have to live, ending, if not in fortune, then in 
character, which is still the noblest fortune ; and 
that all this hectic haste to go ahead and be some- 
thing or do something in advance of this slow and 
sure growth holds in itself the seeds of disaster, as 
all the wild nuts and plums I found, which seemed 
to be ripening before their time, had a worm in 
them somewhere, and the old man's corn, which 
had no business to be growing on the thin upland, 
withered in July, and had to be cut for fodder. 

For when it seems as if our life gave the lie to 
this great truth that all things must have their time, 
and the best grow slowest, it is but mere seeming, 
which vanishes when we once touch the law. It 
seems as if men like Horace Greeley and our poet 
VVhittier were in some way special instances of a 
divine Providence, separate and singular instances 



io6 



Slow and Sure. 



of what is bound in heaven apart from what is 
bound on earth, born in this high sense, like Mel- 
chizedek, without father and mother, and without 
descent ; with no closer kinship to the life of the 
homely race from which they sprang, than a flower 
tossed out of paradise might have to our earth- 
bound gardens. But they were of that splendid 
stock, which, after fighting through such stern 
ordeals as the siege of Deny, came and intrenched 
itself in the wilds of New Hampshire, of which the 
great majority among the original emigrants could 
read and write when this among men of their condi- 
tion was the exception, rather than the rule ; men 
and women who chose for their first minister one 
who, when they were threatened by the Indians, used 
to go into the pulpit with a musket in his hand, set it 
in the corner, and then whisper through the sabbath 
silence, " Let us pray ; " and for their second Mat- 
thew Clark, also an old warrior, who could never at- 
tend to any thing human or divine, when the young 
rogues would bring a drum along, and beat the mar- 
tial music, but must answer to it like an old war- 
horse ; and who said, talking of St. Peter, " What 
was the use cutting off the man's ear in defence of 
the Lord ? Why did he not cut him down, and be 
done with him ? " Men of such a make also as John 
Stark, who, in ten minutes after the news of the 
fight at Lexington, had struck the hills, stopped his 
saw-mill, and galloped away, leaving word for the 



Slow and Sure. 107 

rest to hurry up, which they did to such a purpose 
that in his town of five hundred men, three hun- 
dred and forty-seven enlisted ; men like these, who 
had withal such a deep regard for the humanities, 
that they would pinch and spare to the last line of 
endurance, to send the children to school ; Gree- 
ley's father sending four, and paying their school- 
wage, when he was chopping wood for fifty cents a 
day. Read these lines of life in this light of the 
long, slow sequences of earth and heaven, of gener- 
ations of men and women full of the finest heroism 
and the sturdiest endurance, thoughtful and reverent 
toward whatsoever things are true, and clean and 
pure of life ; and then you see the wonder would have 
been that we should not have had such noble results 
from these grand factors. In heaven, no doubt, one 
reason lies, and that the divinest ; but the reason 
which comes home to us lies right here in this 
world, in the eternal law through which we can be 
sure that the fruit will ripen in God's good time 
if we are true to its slow and steadfast development. 
Take the man, then, of the finest genius, the purest 
moral worth, or the most perfect spiritual insight : he 
is still no miracle. He simply holds in his nature 
the fine distillation and sublimation of human 
character and conduct, ripening, for aught we know, 
through all the generations, since the first father 
fought his way through the world with a stone ham- 
mer, and his first mother sewed skins together with 



io8 



Slow and Sure, 



sinews and a skewer, crooning some sort of rude 
ballad the while over her babe, and lifting her eyes 
to heaven when the dim light reached her of the 
morning of God. 

This is equally true, again, of the way those do 
their work who are in possession of these far-reach- 
ing gifts. The poet sometimes lisps in numbers; 
and the preacher who is to be a great light is now 
and then seen on a stool, a baby boy with a baby 
audience : the merchant prince may drive a keen 
bargain with a fond mother for value given in 
sugar sticks, and the inventor set wheels in motion 
on the stream by the cottage door. But, as a wide 
rule, none of these things happen. The boy is apt 
to be a little slow and backward ; and it is the other 
Burns, the other Scott, and the other Webster, who 
is to be a credit to the family. I found a farmer in 
Wisconsin the other day, who was a schoolboy with 
Charles Dickens. "And was he bright?" I said. 
" Could you guess what was coming? " — " Not at 
all," he answered: "we thought the one who died 
down there in Chicago was by far the brightest. 
Charles was taciturn, had a turn for brooding, 
would go away from our games, or sit and watch 
us, but would seldom play ; and then he was no 
great use, and it was only when we had a little 
drama or recitation that we began to suspect there 
might be something in him." These are the hint? 
of this far-reaching law, when " the treasures started 



Slow and Sure. 



by generations past " come to their fruition in a 
human life. It is rather late, like the leafing of 
the great oaks ; but, when they consent to tell their 
story, this is the sum of it, that they were slowly 
gathering the things of which at last they made 
such noble use, when it seemed as if they were liv- 
ing to no purpose ; and the things they have done 
to the finest purpose are the treasures laid up 
through those slow days, but no more to be hur- 
ried or got at across lots than the fruit of the rare 
old vines or the wines we hear of in the cellars of 
kings. And what is all this but the fulfilling of the 
law ? These men wist not what they were doing, very 
often ; for genius, as a rule, is no more conscious 
of itself than is the rose of its sweetness, or the 
apple of its flavor. They were content, when they 
were at their best, to take their time, and let their 
fruit round and ripen ; play no tricks, nurse no 
fevers, and harbor no worm, please God, in the bud 
of their promise ; and so their fruit remains among 
the treasures of the race. 

Now, it would be of all things strange if this law 
touching the greatest had no meaning when it 
reaches the least, and so only existed to create dis- 
tinctions in our human nature as wide as those be° 
tween great oaks and long-descended vines on the 
one hand, and mushrooms and pursley-patches on 
the other. We might well lose heart in such a 
case, and try to be content, when we feel we belong 



no 



Slow and Sure, 



to the lower orders, with what life could bring us 
between the morning and the night, clutch all the 
enjoyment within our reach in our brief span, and 
then pass away into the mists and shadows of eter- 
nity. 

But this is the truth, that we are all within the 
circle of a great order, in which before God a 
thousand years is as one day. The slow certainties 
of heaven, through which we watch first the blade, 
then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, are 
gathered and treasured in your life and mine, trans- 
mitted to the children we raise in our homes, or 
inform through our spirit ; and life and all things 
move in us also toward the ripening of the harvest 
of God ; and all this haste and fever must be ,a 
sign of the frustration of this holy order, through 
which we ourselves may simply come to a swift 
decay, while still the world about us moves on in 
its ancient order. We all hold in our nature con- 
ditions of growth and ripening, we disturb at our 
peril through unnatural ambitions. So much we 
can do and be, while we hold on quietly, and work 
the work of Him that sent us ; but once let us be- 
gin to say " This will not do : I must go ahead at anv 
cost, make money, climb into high places, push my 
children to the front, or make myself a great name," 
and in doing any of these things wrong these quiet 
forces, which must have their time : then I break 
with the divine order, make shipwreck peril a ps o f 



Slow and Sure. 



in 



faith and a good conscience, grow sick to death at 
last of the whole thing, and wish it were well over. 

Do you think of a fortune, then, as the most 
desirable thing to aim at? This is the truth about 
the wsy to make money so that it will be in any 
sense a blessing : it must be made by patient con- 
tinuance in well-doing. There is no short cut to 
the wealth which stays by you : it is never made on 
a turn of the cards. One great reason why so 
many fortunes melt away so swiftly in this country 
is that the chance to make money by speculation, 
instead of making it in the old fashion by the slow 
and steady growth of a lifetime, has turned this 
whole land into a gambling-hell within the last 
twenty years ; and there can be no solidity in such 
fevered gains. The worm is within them all So the 
saddest thing after the wide-spread desolation which 
struck us in Chicago just now through a broken sav- 
ings bank was this, that the offer of one per cent 
more interest than the rest were paying should have 
proved such a devil's bait. One gentleman, who 
employed many hands, was often consulted as to 
where they should put their savings. He was not 
prepared to answer the question, but spent some 
time 2 J length looking into the matter ; came to the 
conclusion that this bank was not safe; printed a 
circular, and gave it to his men, directing them 
what to do; and then, when the thing went to 
pieces, found that only three of his men had taken 



112 



Slow and Sure 



his advice : the one per cent more had caught a]] 
the rest. Do you want to make a fortune? then 
there is but one way open. A true fortune is 
the result of the qualities we bring into life, and 
of our own conduct and character; while the 
Litter is so great a thing, that, though we die with- 
out a dollar, we may still have made the fortune, 
and transmitted it to our children. A man like 
A. T. Stewait begins with nothing, and transmutes 
every thing he touches into gold. It is but the 
fulfilling of this law of the slow and sure growth. 
Those Stewarts had been striving to get ahead 
across the water — no man can guess how long. 
They gave the boy this quality ; and then all he had 
to do was to take hold, put his life into the work, 
brush aside mere speculation, become the hardest- 
working man in New York, and, in proportion to 
his wealth, the most frugal ; and so he reaped the 
harvest of the long, slow growth. Or, do you wish 
to push your children to the front, go slow. It is a 
noble ambition in its way ; but the forcing process, 
as I have said in another chapter, is always a mis- 
take. Keep them up to the line of this law of 
heaven ; but do not try to force them over it. They 
hold in their nature the conditions of so much in 
so long ; and you cannot, by taking thought, add 
one cubit to that stature. 

Do you want to go to the front yourself, — to 
command the listening senates, or lead the world 



Slow and Sure. 



"3 



captive by your thought, to be a great preacher, or 
the thirteenth man on all the juries, as Wellington 
said of a great pleader in his day, or able to in- 
thrall us by your genius in some other way ? do 
not fuss and fume about it, or complain of the 
long delay. If you have it in you to do any of 
these things, time and the slow, sure order will see 
to it : if not, and you are in dead earnest, still you 
have it in you, and the seed remains and bides its 
time. The singing of Robert Burns was but the 
ripeness of all the endeavors of his race to sing, 
which seemed to end where they began. 

And this truth touches last of all the highest life we 
can live ; for, as you cannot urge on the circles of 
the seasons, or push your life far ahead of these con- 
ditions in these things I have mentioned, so the last 
fine grace of a soul rounded and ripe in religion 
must have its long, slow season. So, while it is sad 
enough to hear how the short cuts they tried to 
take toward heaven lately in the revivals are turn- 
ing out, it is no wonder. All this talk about a fit- 
ness for heaven founded on the fervid feelings of 
the moment, is of no more worth than the claim 
that the shooting blade is fit for the garner, when 
the fervid sun smites the earth in June. Let us 
have the fervid feeling, by all means, when it comes 
Irom above ; but we must never forget tl at religion 
is, of all things we can think of, a long, slow growth. 
It is the arming of the young knight for the battle, 



114 



Slow and Sure. 



not the crowning of the victor, when we first feel 
its power. Saints are not made in a day : it takes 
a lifetime ; and, when some of us have quietly done 
our best, we shall still have to cry from the far line 
where earth and heaven meet, "Not that I have 
already attained, or am already perfect/' and leave 
it all in the assurance that, as in the lower ranges of 
life character and conduct get themselves stored 
away and ripen at last into something very noble 
and good, so it must be in this best thing a man 
can be and do. We carry with us, and leave be- 
hind us, what can never fail out of any world ; but, 
waiting through the long seasons of God, it is sure 
to come to perfection in his good time. I read 
such a story as that of the Wesleys, for this reason, 
with endless interest. When we first find them they 
are striving after this divine life, trying to put it into 
books and hymns and sermons, and above all into 
pious lives; still they seem to make not much 
headway, until at last these boys come into the old 
parsonage with the whole wealth of all this striving 
in their nature, become the true liberal Christians 
of their day, wander over the land saying and sing- 
ing the divine word, and change in time the whole 
religious life of England, bringing light to thousands 
of dark souls, and touching them to the quick for a 
better life. I love to read the story, because it is 
the key to all stories of striving through frustration, 
keeping close to the slow and sure law, and then at 



Slow and Sure. 



ll 5 



last coming to the full ripeness ; and it is the truth 
we all have to lay to heart. We want to be pure 
and good and ripe in this best ripeness. It is slow 
work, but it is sure. It is sure as the ripening of 
the fruits and the grain, and as their slow develop- 
ment out of wild things into the fine results we 
gather into our marts and fairs. Only this we must 
be sure about : that we keep right on, take no stock 
in the delusion that there is a short and easy way 
to this full ripeness, give no place to fever and 
fretting in this last best thing, we can be and do ; 
but trust in the eternal God, who, out of just such 
material, by the long, slow ripening of his grace in 
unnumbered human lives, in the full time pave us 
his Ciiiisc. 

October, s$7* 



WORKING AND RF&TING. 



" Jesus loved Martha and her sister." 

Luke's Gospel. 



WORKING AND RESTING. 



1 suppose we all find out soon or late that to rest 
well may be as good and true a thing as to work 
well. And as in the course of the year the spring 
comes and wakes up the world into an intense 
activity, while the summer again brings the burden 
and heat of the day, and then the autumn perfects 
through her still, golden hours, what spring and 
summer have wrought ; so we have all been aware, 
now and then, of the times in which the spirit 
wakes up into an energy in which we feel like 
doing every thing we have to do, at one stroke ; but 
after this there is another call, just as clear, to be 
quiet ; then, if we obey this call as we obeyed 
the other, we find a certain completeness has come 
in the stillness which could never come through 
the toil. 

Still it is no doubt true that the time when we are 
most active seems to be our best estate. It is sel- 

119 



120 Working and Resting. 



dom quite clear that we can do as good service 
either for God or man when we are still as when 
we are stirring. In this active country and time, 
especially, we are prone to feel that to do nothing 
is to be nothing. It is as if we should do nothing 
Li the rapids of the St. Lawrence, in a boat alone. 
The majestic motion of the life about us over- 
comes us so, that the gracious word " contempla- 
tion," in the old, true sense of it, is as strange to us 
as Sanscrit ; and we contemplate the very heavens 
to find out how many millions of miles the suns and 
stars manage to do in a day. Work while it is 
day, is the watchword of our age, and it seems to 
be always day. It is only a tradition in our life, 
that there was once a time when human souls could 
rise to a high place, and shine as the stars, while 
men and women sat and listened to the still, small 
voice. Time to us now means the time in which 
to work our stint ; our psalm of life is " Let us, then, 
be up and doing ; " and Christians, denouncing as 
infidel the suggestion that God cannot have rested 
on the seventh day, illustrate their own faith by 
never resting. 

And this is no great wonder to me as I notice 
how easy it is to get the good and see the good of 
a supreme activity. Every man and woman of any 
worth about us has been trained to believe in the 
religion of work. The old battle between faith 
and works is about over, and faith in work is the 



Working and Resting. 



121 



general agreement, so that real honest labor of any 
sort has come to be sacred, and the leathern apron 
of the old religion has its own sacredness among the 
men of to-day ; and workers like George Stephen- 
son come nearest in their minds to the modern 
idea of a true saint. He that worketh righteousness 
is righteous in the n lost literal sense, and the true 
eye and hand is our synonyme of the true heart. 
This is natural, again, when we notice how the worth 
of work impresses us, turn which way we will ; and 
Nature and Providence are forever pushing us into 
it as our only true salvation. From the single 
flower-bed in our small garden, to the cultivation 
of a state ; from the care of a mother about her 
children's garments, to the manufactures of a com- 
monwealth ; from the economy of a household to 
the administration of a republic; and from the 
teaching of a child to the education of a nation ; in 
commerce, politics, and religion, in life everywhere, a 
voice seems to be crying to us, " Work out your own 
salvation, — work, work, work ! " The flowers we 
left a-bloom over night are threatened in the morn- 
ing ; the clothes, trim and bright when school calls, 
are a sight to see at bedtime ; the pass-book at 
the store, left to take its own way . appalls you at the 
end of the month ; and, while you rested from 
teaching your boy a good lesson, he learned a bad 
one. I found some wise men in Lawrence once, 
quite uneasy about their machinery. It was as 



122 Working and Resting. 



good as could be made yesterday, but meanwhile 
Fall River had started some which had to-day also 
in its heart ; so Lawrence had to put to-day in also. 
Boston had been asleep only a little while, — the 
" North American Review " said once, — but then 
New York had come in like the strong man armed, 
and robbed her of her commerce. You let go at 
your peril anywhere ; all things work together for 
good only as we all work together. 

" And so man toils and cares, 
And still through toil can learn great Nature's frame, 
Till he can almost tame brute mischiefs, 
And can touch invisible things, 
And turn all warring ills to purposes of good." 

Then, again, Activit) whenever she appears is so 
handsome and taking, and has so much to say fiji 
herself compared with her sister Stillness, that she 
carries us captive at once, keeps us under her 
thrall, and will never let us draw comparisons, if 
she can help it, which will peril at all her claim. 

To see the household crisp and clean as a new 
silver dollar, because the mistress can never rest 
with a pin out of its place, or a fly in it ; and full 
and plenty in hall and kitchen, because the hus 
band and father is at work every day, and sll day- 
long, with never a thought of resting ; to see farms 
and factories shine with prosperity because those 
that conduct them give their days and nights and 
Sundays to thinking what shall be done next ; to 



Working and Resting. 123 



see a church full of interested worshippers, because 
the minister is a tireless worker himself, and knows 
how tc keep everybody else at work, — we under- 
stand all this easily, feel its power, and love it so 
well as to forget, perhaps, there can be any thing 
else worthy to come into comparison with its 
claims. 

Now, I noticed in the ocean in my vacation once, 
the might, by contrast, of its stillness and then of 
its motion ; how sometimes the blue waters would 
melt away into the blue sky, full of innocent, sweet 
dimples which made you feel as if the sea was 
laughing with content ; and then again the waters 
would surge, and roll and leap into white foam in 
their passion, against the great calm cliffs. And this 
was what I noticed beside,— that on the still waters, 
and in them, rested the clear sun. 

The sweetest sight I ever saw of the sea was 
one on Nantucket, where they told me the waters 
stretched clear away, without a break, to Lisbon ; 
and they were like those John saw in his vision, 
" clear as crystal, like unto transparent glass ; " but 
after this in the tumbling waters I saw only broken 
lights ; there was a shining on the edges, but not 
in the deeps ; a stormful grandeur and glory, but no 
sense of the old, quiet, winsome beauty. 

And so I think there are some quiet souls which 
drink in the light, and mirror it, as the still sea 
drinks in and mirrors the sunshine, — men like 



124 



Working and Resting. 



Hawthorne, who for doing things, as we understand 
the term, take so poor a place that they are like to 
starve. Hawthorne had a brain, they say, as large 
as Webster's ; but because he had a still soul, and 
kept it still, there were times when he could hardly 
get bread for his wife and children. So I notice 
good, notable women, who are wonders at house- 
keeping, love to remember how those of their sis- 
ters who have made their mark as thinkers, are, as 
a rule, among the poorest housekeepers to be found ; 
and the best preachers, we rather like to say, are 
the poorest pastors. 

I have a friend in the ministry, a perfect battery 
of energy, at whose house another minister, who has 
taken the highest honors, lodged a month once ; 
and the worker was so troubled at the quiet ways 
of his guest, that he will probably never get over it, 
but will still be saying, " What a shame it was for a 
man to lounge about as he did then ! " So did the 
sea lounge about that day when all the sun was in 
its heart \ so did Hawthorne lounge about in Salem. 
The truth is, my capital friend mistook stillness for 
stagnation \ he ought to have reverenced what he 
scorned. Beautiful is the activity which works for 
good, and beautiful the stillness which waits for 
good; blessed the self-sacrifice of the one, and 
blessed the self-forgetfulness of the other. Ther^ 
are times, I think, when we should all be glad 
because we are quiet ; when both the strong motion 



Working and Resting. 125 



and the strong emotion of existence should be over 
and done with for a spell, and all things be as nought 
to us in the presence of a pure stillness, which, like 
the great sea I saw, only drinks in the sun, and 
glasses his brightness with the whole heart. 

And I doubt not this may often mean just to be 
still, and no more ; to cast off the burdens of life 
for a while, and let things go very much as they 
will go after we are dead and gone ; to conclude, 
if we can, that so long as we need this rest, and 
must have it, we will try to forget how much we 
are needed among the workers. This seems to 
have been the primitive idea of the sabbath, and of 
some of the Hebrew festivals. The sabbath means 
in the grain of it that once a week, at any rate, you 
shall make your way into a perfectly quiet world, in 
which even the food you eat shall give you no 
great concern : the whole good day shall be encir- 
cled, so far as possible, in stillness. It touches the 
ancient faith in quietness as well as in motion, in 
rest as well as in toil, in the still soul of us as the 
complement to the active, - — a faith those curious 
modern observations verify that show how the fabrics 
in our factories grow poorer on Saturday and better 
on Monday, and every sort of toiler, tied perpetu- 
ally to his task, loses wealth of life in proportion 
to the continuance of his labor. It is our need to 
give up sometimes and be still, toward which Sun- 
day points, aside from all other sacredness. To be 



126 Working and Resting, 



still, in the simple sense of doing nothing but re- 
joice that we have nothing to do, may often be "a 
holy quiet " to overworking men. 

Yet this, of course, is only the most outward 
and obvious thing. It is what men are ordered to 
do by their doctors, who neglect the advice of their 
ministers. The right of Nature she will never give 
up, but will steadily insist on, until we see by loss 
or gain, or both, that she must have her way. And 
men of business will always do well to believe that 
one of the most profitable investments they can 
make, on occasion, is positively a long lounge 
through a whole summer's day. I had a friend 
once in Michigan, who was one of those busy men 
cumbered with much serving weekday and Sunday, 
always at work, never at rest ; who took the sudden 
and strange resolve, that he would wander away, 
one summer's day, into the silence, and sun his 
heart in it to its full content. It was toward an 
upland he wandered, among a nest of small lakes, 
with fringes of wood and wild pasture ; and there 
he told me, away on in the afternoon, when he had 
drunken deep of the quietness, as he was lying 
with his face toward the grass, happening to lift his 
head, he saw, as by one flash of light, that the lines 
of some of these lakes ran higher than those of 
one he had tapped for his grist-mill. Then he saw 
how their waters could be used to supplement those 
he had in hand, tide him over the summer drought 



Working and Resting. r*j 

and give him all the aid he wanted ; and when he 
told me the story, he had opened the way to these 
reservoirs, and found the plan was answering to a 
charm. I told him then, he would believe after this 
in the good of being still sometimes as a capital busi- 
ness investment. And now the story comes into my 
thought, to intimate how springs and fountains may 
sometimes be opened to our quietness, we clean 
miss in our cares. The best there is in the Bible, 
and the great thinkers, the poets and seers outside 
the Bible, will never open out into its truest worth 
to busy cumbered souls. We find these waters of 
life at their clearest in quiet days. Shakspeare, 
Milton, and every other sun or star of truth, must 
have a still soul to shine in, or one can only have 
such broken lights from them as I saw in the 
stormy sea. 

My good father, who never rested until he got to 
heaven, used to tell me how old Mr. Murray of 
Leeds, who was one of the pioneers of the new 
industries of England, used to push aside every 
drawing and tool, and put his work away, when he 
was beaten by some problem, and go two or three 
days into a stillness where no man or work could 
come near him ; and then the problem would, as it 
were, solve itself. So, I think, will many a perplexity 
solve itself when we let it entirely alone, if we 
are overburdened, and dwell for a space in the 
silence and rest. Many troubles solve themselves 



128 Working and Resting. 



when we give them this advantage, which still refuse 
to do it for all our striving ; and every man knows 
how by simply taking some perplexity into that 
deepest of all silences, — a sound, good sleep, — 
and then waiting for the solution, the first thing in 
the morning the knot has been untied. 

So I love to read these words, " Jesus loved Mar- 
tha and her sister." They are sisters, but they are 
of these diverse kinds. Martha is full of activity, 
Mary of stillness. They appear three times in the 
Gospels, and it is always in these differing char- 
acters. Martha is hospitable and warm-hearted, 
ready with her tongue, and not over-careful about 
what" she says. Mary is quiet and restful as a 
Quaker. Martha is cumbered about many things, 
entertaining her company, and seeing all goes right ; 
but Mary sits still, careless by comparison about the 
way things go sometimes, if she can but sun her 
soul in the light. And Jesus loved them both. 

And I imagine I can guess how it should be so, 
when I notice how the stillness which touched him 
is not that of mere stagnation, but that of a deep 
quiet soul which could only find what it wanted in 
this way, at this time. Mary could not bustle about 
and get the dinner, as her sister did ; and I am not 
sure it would have been fit to eat if she had got it. 
Make what you will of it, the Marys can seldom 
do that as well as the Marthas. But think for one 
instant of what is going on in the house that day. 



Working and Resting. 



Here is one whose words can open the very heav- 
ens if his hearers will but strp to listen. He is 
saying things in those brief moments, which will 
live through the ages, as wheat lives, always feeding 
the world, and always growing to fresh harvests ; 
but not a word does good notable Martha hear of 
it. The chicken and omelet and wheaten cakes 
fill her whole mind. It may be one of the para- 
bles he opened to them then, and never again ; and 
twenty years after Luke comes there with an anxious 
face, and says to Martha, " Do you remember such a 
time when the Master was here ? " — " Oh ! very well 
indeed," she answers. "Then you will remember 
his saying something about a wild boy, who went off 
and came to a dreadful destitution, and then came 
home again ; and how the Master came to say it, 
and just what he did say." — " Not a word of it," the 
active woman cries : " I had enough to think about 
in getting the dinner. But there's Mary, now, who 
would not do a thing that day, but just sit and listen, 
and leave me all the care and worry : she can tell, I 
warrant you, all about it." And Mary can tell. She 
has never forgotten what she heard that day ; and so 
she calls up the great memory, and the evangelist 
gladly takes it down, and there is the bread which 
cometh down from heaven, feeding us forevermore. 
For this must have been the way these things were 
saved for us. They were taken into a few quiet 
souls, and treasured while the active, headlong world 



r jQ Working and Resting. 

about them went on too busy to care. So the active^ 
energetic, unresting men and women do all I have 
claimed for them, and are entirely indispensable 
and perfectly invaluable, especially if now and again 
they can afford to stop. They push along the world 
up to a certain fair line ; but there is something still 
they cannot do, of quite an unspeakable worth. 
Nothing can be better, then, than to work well, and 
rest well, and blend both together into one life ; to 
be astir to the tips of the fingers and the centres of 
the heart and brain, and then to be still and leave 
it all as the finest consummation and completeness 
we can compass* 



GOD'S POOR. 



" When the Spaniard gives to the poor, he does it with 
uncovered head, a. u humbly." 

Howell's Letters, 1688. 



GOD'S POOR. 



I know of nothing in the Bible more sweet and 
tender than its pleadings for the poor. They seem 
to be its adopted children. When there is no help 
for them anywhere else, its notes are good for 
shelter and food and fire, waiting to be honored 
by those who have something to spare ; and, when 
every other current of blessing sets away from their 
doors, the steady stream of the pity of God in 
pitiful human hearts still turns that way, and flows 
through their kitchens and chambers as a great 
benediction. And while there is no doubt in these 
wise souls who speak to us, as to the truth that 
poverty may often come through the faults and 
failings of those who have to bear it, especially 
when we measure them by the standards which are 
just and true to our own lives, almost every word 
about the causes for poverty as they rest in the man 
himself are warnings of what is sure to come if he 



134 



God's Poor, 



does not take care, rather than reproaches when the 
doom has fallen, made worse by the sting of, " I 
told you so, and it serves you right. 5 ' 

In the Book of Proverbs there is a fine store 
of these warnings ; pictures of the sluggard who 
leaves his bit of land neglected because he will not 
or can not rise with the lark, — a fault for which I 
have not had the heart to blame him .his many a 
year, — of others again opening the door to meet 
the shrewd north-easter, cutting them like cold 
steel, creeping back into the warmth, and saying, " I 
cannot plough to-day possibly," because the thin 
blood in them shrank from the ordeal as we should 
shrink from a surgical operation ; and such people 
are exhorted to study the ant, and see how, in the 
brave summer weather, he lays up his stores against 
the frost and snow, as if a well-bred ant was not 
sure to do better than the loose and shambling 
fragments of a man like Sam Lawson, who is born 
without the instinct to work, and cannot compass 
the will. This is all honest talk, Solomon gathers 
for us by the wisdom of many and the wit of one ; 
the result, no doubt, of ages of experience and 
observation ; and such lessons are never to be neg- 
lected, because they belong to the very underpin- 
ning of society. And Paul fitly sums them all into 
one terse sentence, " He that will not work, neither 
shall he eat." 

But exactly as we find in the good old Book pity 



God^s Poor, 



i3S 



and mercy for those who do not fulfil their contract 
with Heaven, and the revelation of a longing in the 
divine heart to lift us out of our spiritual poverty, 
and make us men, and as we believe, that, when 
there is no more hope for us in this world, the good 
God will not then push us down to despair an) 
more than we should send a man from the North to 
New Orleans in September, who had caught the 
yellow fever ; so it is on this earthward side with the 
poor and their poverty. Once sure of the bitter 
fact that they are destitute, then there is a spirit like 
that of the brooding mother-bird toward the little 
wretch which has wandered away from her, and got 
lost : no pecking or scolding is in order until the 
starveling is warmed and fed : these can wait, this 
cannot ; these are penalty, this is pity. And so all 
the blessing the book has to give is given to those 
who plead the cause of the poor, and feed and 
help them ; and not one grain, so far as I know, to 
those who, when they want bread, turn them away 
with a stony parcel of good advice. 

So a man like Paul may say ever so sternly, " He 
that will not work, neither shall he eat ; " and he will 
be the first man in the world to eat his own words 
when work is not to be found, and hunger is in the 
poor man's house. He knows something about 
hunger, and what havoc it can make in a saint, let 
alone a sinner who will not earn a dinner ahead in 
good times, and then when bad times come has to 



136 



God's Poor. 



dream of good dinners, and wake up to find the 
cupboard as empty as a church. So I think I see 
the apostle mounting guard over the small purse the 
churches have sent him to use as he thinks best \ 
and how one comes to him who in good times was 
an easy-going good-for-nothing, but his face is thin 
and pinched to-day, and he hangs his he id. " What 
do you want?" Paul says with a hard strain in his 
voice. " I want a little money, master, for the love 
of God." — " But do you not remember how I gave 
you work on my tents at good wages, and how you 
worked well for a few days, and then went away to 
the games, and never came back ? Now see what I 
have written : ' he that will not work, neither shall he 
eat : ' what do you think of that, my man? " — " I 
think it is all true, master, so does Mary and the chil- 
dren ; for we have eaten nothing to-day over there in 
the shanty, and not much these many days : and I 
hated to come, but she said I must come, it was 
our last chance ; and she said I was to ask you — 
What was it she said I was to ask you ? I cannot 
quite remember things since we were so hungry. Ah ! 
now I mind : to ask you if you did not tell us once 
how Jesus said, 'They that are whole need no phy- 
sician, but they that are sick ; and I am come to 
seek and to save that which was lost.' And then 
she said, ' Whatever you do, you must not forget to 
ask him what he thinks Jesus would have done if he 
had been in your place.' " Then I think Paul feels 



God's Poor. 



*37 



as if he had been struck by an unseen arrow, and 
this is just what has happened. The anger of God's 
pity has sent it flying out of heaven, dipped in the 
tears of a mother whose children are crying for 
bread, and made sharp with a woman's wit. nn ie 
hard strain goes out of his voice, the tears come 
into his eyes : . he does not count the pennies very 
carefully, but dips his hand well down in the bag, 
and says, "Tell Mary I will be round, and see what 
can be done to set you on your feet again." And 
then, as the poor wretch shambles away, the old 
saint says to himself, " God forgive me ! I meant well, 
but I had no idea I could be so blind to the grace 
which was in Christ Jesus." 

There is a man to be met with far and wide, 
who can quote these words, "He that will not 
work, neither shall he eat/' and make them good 
to his own mind. It is the man who wants to 
feel sure he has the Bible to back him when he 
turns away from a fellow-man in want and misery, 
and yet feels uneasy at what he has done, because 
there are hiding-places in his heart in which, if 
you could break the shell, you would find crumbs 
of a sweet compassion, like the kernel in a hick- 
ory-nut grown on poor land. It is a great thing 
for such an one to be able to fall back on the 
Bible : he can cite Heaven then, in the face of its 
own pity, and persuade himself it would be a sin 
to go against so clear a revelation ; and his Bible 



'3« 



God's Poor, 



opens to such passages as naturally and easily as a 
maiden's prayer-book opens to the wedding-service. 
There is another man, who, when he finds dire and 
desperate need, neither considers the strict measure 
of his own ability, nor of the starving man's de- 
serving. He has the heart in him of the great 
Frenchman who was hungry to agony once in the 
Revolution, and made a vow that no man should 
ever suffer again so woefully if he could prevent it ; 
or of the old squire in our town among the moors, 
who had never known what it was to want, but 
when the poor Irish came swarming over after the 
potato-rot, hungry as wolves in winter, but with no 
great mind for work, thought first, I suppose, of the 
pity of God, then of their nature and training, and 
this hunger which had robbed them of the last 
shred of self-respect ; and used to order his steward 
to kill a beef now and then, which with meal and 
milk and their vanished potatoes, and no end of 
good advice on a full stomach, set them up in some 
poor way, and started them afresh. He was a 
Catholic, the Frenchman was what we call an infidel : 
they were both God's almoners, and brothers so far 
of Jesus Christ. 

For, while it must be true that one of the worst 
things we can do for a man is to build up his men- 
dicancy on our charity, the question, What can we 
do for the poor ? must still turn in some way on 
what has been left undone when they come on om 



God's Poor. 



*39 



hands. So when I notice that about the last man 
in the world to come begging to my door is a 
Scotchman or one of the northern Irish, while the 
great majority of beggars are from the south and 
west of Ireland, I have to seek a reason for this 
fact away down in the depths of our common 
nature ; and while something may well be charged 
to the misgovernment of England, to the influence 
of a church which helps to create mendicants per- 
haps through its over-praise of alms-giving, and, 
above all, through whiskey, the baleful mother of 
so much misery and crime, the deeper reason must 
still lie in a certain inbred poverty of nature, —a 
backward or retarded development ten thousand 
years behind that of the yellow-haired, blue-eyed, 
great-limbed fellows who swept into the circle of 
civilization from the North, and have carried all 
before them in the long hard fight for the first 
place. For what we are compelled to observe in 
races is true of men. You could not, and I could 
not, take a much lower place than this we stand on 
to-day. The eager hunger to be about as far along 
as we are was in our nature when we first took hold 
of life ; and as the song soars in the lark, and then 
the lark soars, so this whole upward march ha:; 
been on the line of our will, our ambition, and our 
delight. The spears of fate and fortune have all 
Iain with their points slanting upward as we climbed 
the steep, and have only risen to threaten or stab us 



140 God's Poor. 

when we turned about, and tried to head down. 
But suppose they had slanted the other way, as they 
do for so many ; that the way down had been easy, 
and the way up hard ; suppose this ambition and 
delight in rising had been left out of our nature, 
and instead of this we had found a careless, easy- 
going quality, sown with the seeds of evil appetites 
from a former generation : would not such a fact as 
this alter the standard of judgment before the 
great white throne ? And so may not the Judge of 
all the earth be saying to you and me, " You are 
not half so good as you think you are ; neither are 
these who have never had your nature or your op- 
portunity to be weighed against you in the scales " ? 
" O master ! " one of these poor folk said once to 
a gentleman, " if you only knew how lazy I am, I 
think you would give me a shilling ; " and the very 
impudence of the man, as I have heard, drew the 
coin. But was that only impudence ? I think it 
may have been a truth so simple and sincere that 
he could have told it to God as we tell our sorrows 
and confess our sins. 

We can never begin to understand these poor, 
i hen, as we should, until we see how much less o( 
merit there is in our better estate, and of demerit in 
theirs, than we commonly imagine. These things 
v? e have done to win our better place are but the 
shadows of what Nature and Providence have done 
for us in our birth and breeding. So I say without 



God's Poor, 



hesitation that by grace we are saved through faith 
from sending our children to back-doors, picking 
up cold scraps. 

Still one must not push the principle over the 
line of a fair judgment. If we make this truth of 
a radical difference in nature, the reason for giving 
right and left, not trying to find out what better 
thing we can do than to give alms of all we pos- 
sess, we can easily and we shall surely aggravate 
the evil we seek to assuage. 

The first thing we must do, indeed, to help a 
starving man, is to give him food and fire ; once 
sure that this is his condition, here is our first duty ; 
we might as well talk to the Great Pyramid as to a 
man fainting with hunger, before we feed him, about 
trying to take care of himself. But this once well 
done, we are bound, if we can do it, to find out 
whether the man has lost the battle of life, or was 
never really fit to fight it, or whether he is one of 
this ever-growing number who set themselves to 
cheat our sympathies, pick our pockets, and close 
up the way to those who are on any account de- 
serving our utmost compassion. 

A good friend of mine was caught by one of 
these rascals once, who came to him in the guise oi 
a reformed drunkard, or rather one who could oe 
sure of himself if he once had ten dollars to start 
him in life. He got the money, went his way, and 
was back in a month with the old story. The kind 



142 



God's Poor, 



good heart was still open to him, and the purse. 
How much he got, first and last, no man knows ; 
but at last the rogue lost his bearings, went one day, 
and said in the cheeriest way you can imagine, 
r Doctor, I have fallen again ; " and then he had to 
get out of the house quick, driven by that mighty 
anger we read of as the wrath of the Lamb, and 
was never seen again. Now, we cannot deal with 
wickedness as we deal with weakness, and that man 
was a common thief, who had not the courage to 
run his risk by picking pockets in the ordinary way ; 
and we can give no quarter to this sort of rogue, 
because he not only robs us, but at the same time 
he robs those needing our help, who are in some 
poor way worthy. These are not those who are 
born with a fatal weakness of the marrow or the 
brain, which leaves them stranded, or with passions 
which master all the principle they ever had, or 
who have fallen on misfortune, and can never get 
on their feet again except we lend them at least a 
finger \ who cry to us to help them, the poor, over 
whom the angel of pity spreads his wide wings as 
he whispers to those about them, " What are you 
going to do for these poor children of God? " 

Something we can all do in the most dismal 
times. There is not a man of us who is not as rich 
as the Astors in comparison with some poor fellow 
wc know of always at the edge of winter, or some 
widow, shrinking back in shame as she tries to 



God's Poor. 



muster courage to see the poormaster. We can 
take hold of such destitute folk just where we find 
them, not asking over-eagerly as to where the money 
went they ought to have made when times were 
better, perhaps ; and, instead of giving them the 
scraps from our table, take a little thought about 
putting what we do into a good shape, so that our 
gift may be robbed of the woeful look it must take 
on without such a tender touch. And then if with 
this we will make up our minds to get at the secret 
of their poverty, and try to find a sure remedy for 
that, giving them the chance all the time to do 
something in return, which may save what crumb 
of pride there is still in their nature, adorning our 
endeavor all the while with a genuine sympathy as 
to a poor brother, — we shall have done something 
to answer the angels who will be haunting our 
warm rooms, and looking at our well-spread tables. 



I 



A CAROL WITH A CAUTION. 



Each age has deemed the new-born year 
The fittest time for festal cheer. . . . 
And well our Christian sires of old 
Loved when the year its course had rolled 
And brought blithe Christmas back again, 
With all his hospitable train. 



A CAROL WITH A CAUTION. 



The things we do at Christmas are touched with 
a certain grain of extravagance, as beautiful in 
some o" ^r* aspects as the extravagance of nature 
in June, 

It is the children's carnival, the midsummer of 
chari.j 10 the poor, the spring-tide of good-will to 
men ; the time of the year when heaven opens, and 
the angels come down and sing to sailors on the 
ocean, to old-country folks in the lone reaches of 
new colonies, to people in hospitals, poor-houses, 
and mansions, and "the huts where poor men lie ; " 
the time when the atmosphere is just right for 
clear - burning fires, and it would be something of 
a shame for the wind to send the smoke down any 
chimney as it does a week before or after ; when 
there is a goodly smell abroad, as if the frankin- 
cense the wise men brought on a day long ago, to 
temper the taint of a stable, had got into this whole 



148 A Carol with a Caution. 



world of ours, as a trailing cloud of the odors of 
spiced bread ; when the poorest platters and mugs 
take a touch of line recklessness by reason of the 
thoughtfulness of those who have bread enough 
and to spare ; when the Christmas-tree groans all 
radiant and fruitful, as no other tree does which 
blooms through the year; for it bears at least 
twelve manner of fruit, and the leaves of the tree 
are for the healing of the nations. 

I would not, therefore, insult Christmas by un- 
derdoing it. The man who then does most for 
his fellow-men, according to his means, does best. 
We can give the tramp who comes to our back 
door, a royal cup of coffee Christmas morning, with 
a good grace, though we have to see that he does 
not run off with the spoon. (Our people in that 
case, I notice, use pewter.) They are wide pages 
the angel opens in the book of life at Christmas ; 
and when we do our best, we cannot do it quicker 
than he can write it down. 

Still I think it is not hard to see how we may 
spare, even at the Christmas-tide, and yet do more 
and better than if we spend. 

If a man spends the money he ought to save to 
pay his debts, when he knows very well he can only 
pay his debts by saving, he may give what he buys, 
right and left with an open hand, and it will be to 
his own shame. 

I have never digested one of the best suppers I 



A Carol with a Caution. 149 



ever sat down to in my life, though it is years since 
I ate it, because, as it came out after, my host 
owed for it at the store, and the debt was never 
paid. I don't want any more of those suppers. 
There are millions of dollars spent every Christmas, 
of other men's money. Not a penny ought to be 
laid out in gifts one can well let alone. Men who 
do that get drunk on their generosity, though they 
never taste of wine ; and, if they are men of con- 
science, the headache and heartache of getting 
sober will be none the less for their motive in get- 
ting drunk. 

We should never spend when we ought to spare, 
especially if we have families. One of the saddest 
things I have struck in my life has been the sight 
of families left destitute, through a certain easy- 
going generosity in the man out of whose life they 
sprang, who would have every thing of the best, 
trusting to his luck to come out all right; who 
would spare nothing at Christmas-time, or any 
other time, so that he might have things handsome, 
while he did not lay up a dollar for a rainy day or 
for that instant peril of death which dogs all our 
footsteps between the cradle and the grave. Sav- 
ing is so slow to such men, and so hard ! But 
they do not remember that a hundred dollars a 
year, paid to a sound life insurance company, on a 
healthy life of a certain age, is five thousand dollars 
if the stroke comes a day after the investment, and 



150 A Carol with a Caution, 



that the premium on ten thousand dollars, or even 
twenty thousand dollars, may be only the savings 
from cigars, or "nips " or rides they need not take, 
or a score of things beside men and women can 
manage to dispense with just as well as not, inciud- % 
ing the over-extravagance of the Christmas carnival. 

I can say this for myself, that from the day when 
I got as much insurance as made me feel sure that, 
whatever might happen, my old neighbors and 
friends would never have to say, " Poor fellow ' 
he was too generous with his money : let us pass 
round the hat for his family," the poison for me 
has been taken out of the sting of death. "O 
death! where is thy sting?" the apostle cries. I 
answer, that to a well-bred man of our serious, 
home-loving race, it is more surely in that intolera- 
ble pain he feels when he kisses his wife and children 
the last time, and knows he has made no provision 
for their future, than it is in any possible fear of 
what death may do to him. And I should not 
take much stock in that man who would not close 
instantly with the proposal of a decent competence 
for the wife and children, in exchange for the open 
gates of heaven, and the angels waiting with a 
crown, if he had the chance. 

"We brought nothing into this world, and it is 
certain we can carry nothing out," the sad old He- 
brew cries. I answer, Surely, surely, if you mean 
mere things ; but somewhere within me, when I go 



A Carol with a Caution. 1 3 1 



away, I carry the account of what I have done to 
fend for those I leave behind me, and save them 
from the bitter pangs of poverty, by my forethought, 
self-denial, and clear grit, from the day when I 
took a maid from her mother, and said, " Trust me 
to take care of you, whatever comes, to be a house- 
bond to you and the children God may give us : ?; 
yes, even by pushing back Christmas, if we have to 
do it, and letting the bairns rise to find empty 
stockings these hard times. Better empty stock- 
mgs to-day than the bitter, bare winter of poverty 
if I should be taken from them. I can easily im- 
agine how a man would be glad to exchange his 
golden harp and crown, if he could, for good six 
per cent stock, if he should find himself in heaven 
— supposing a man could go there, when, through 
his own. carelessness, he has left a wife and family 
of lit/le children without a penny in the world. 



OCT 12 \m 



I 



